Smoke And Words
by Anti-Kryptonite
Summary: Somewhere, there are white walls. Four of them, tall and padded and unyielding. In those white walls, there is a girl who used to sing but now only screams. Sometimes, when she falls silent, there is another voice, a silvery clarion voice that spirals and builds and comforts, erecting beautiful constructs in her mind. And sometimes...sometimes she dreams of another world.
1. Chapter 1

Somewhere, there are white walls. Four of them, tall and padded and unyielding. In those white walls, there is a girl who used to sing but now only screams. Within that room, there are echoes that circle and rebound until eventually they are swallowed up by the confines themselves.

The room is bloated on the shrieks that leave her throat bleeding.

The girl doesn't always scream. Sometimes, she is silent. Sometimes, she listens to the ghosts of someone else's screams.

Occasionally, she rages.

The walls drink in, equally, her blood and her fury and her grief.

* * *

Katniss is already struggling to regulate her breathing even before she becomes aware that she has woken from another nightmare. Prim stirs beside her but doesn't wake, and Katniss lets out a sigh of relief. Her shoulders ache with tension when she sits up and hunches over her knees, rubbing the heels of her palms against her eyes to blot out the lingering nightmare.

It's early. The sky is just beginning to brighten with dawn, blue and purple and the beginnings of that pale orange that always catches her attention.

Ignoring her exhaustion, Katniss slips out of bed and tightens the blanket around Prim. No need for her sister's rest to be disturbed. It's important that Prim get to experience nicer things in life, like sleeping in past dawn (like not being haunted by nightmares that make no sense).

In only a few moments, Katniss is dressed and heading out of the house toward the hole in the fence.

Her mother and sister will need to eat tonight.

* * *

The woods are quiet and still. She moves through them like a wraith, picking and choosing her targets with ease, long habit ensuring that each one she aims at ends up in her game bag. When the day has begun and the sun is past the rim of the horizon, she meets up with Gale, who's checking his snare lines.

"Good day?" he asks, and Katniss smiles (it's easier to smile out here, beyond the fence, in the quiet, where she has never had a nightmare).

"All right," she says, and he smiles back.

She doesn't remember exactly how long she and Gale have been friends (partners, really, out here, allies against the constant threat of starvation), but she's glad for him. The woods are quiet and still, and she would have them no other way, but it's nice, occasionally, to have a couple words of conversation and a companionable smile.

Gale takes his share home to his mother and three younger siblings. Katniss heads into town.

* * *

The merchants are all early risers, usually up and busy before the Seam rouses and spits out its tribute of coal miners for the subterranean depths. Katniss makes her rounds along the back doors of the square, saving the baker until the end. She managed to bag four squirrels, and she's hoping he's desperate enough for meat to take them all.

"Katniss," he greets her when he opens the door to her knock. He's always kind, the baker, always generous with his trades. "What do you have for me today?"

"Four squirrels," she says (never show timidity, she learned that years ago).

"Four?" He hesitates, but then smiles. "All right. How about two loaves of bread and some new buns my son's trying out?"

"Sounds good," she says. She hoped for cookies, to surprise Prim with, but anything with bread and some form of sweetness is treat enough. Besides, she's too afraid that he'll decide he doesn't need all four squirrels if she tries to haggle.

When the baker leaves the doorway to gather her bread, Katniss sees into the bakery. She's surprised to realize that he's not alone. His youngest son is kneading some dough at an island in the middle of the kitchen. It's warm in the bakery (the heat is emanating out toward her, thawing the chill in her brittle fingers) so she supposes that's why Peeta's cheeks are flushed as he darts sidelong glances at her.

Katniss shifts uncomfortably. Peeta's always made her…awkward. Clumsy. Unsure. She doesn't know why. Or rather, she never lets herself think on why. Better just to ignore him and avoid the whole uncomfortable situation altogether.

"H-hey," Peeta stutters after a minute. Katniss jumps. She doesn't remember him ever speaking to her before.

"Hey," she mutters, and is grateful when the baker returns with her food.

"Here you are," he says. "Be sure to let me know what you think of the cheese buns. Peeta's sure they're going to be a hit, but I'm not so certain. You'll decide for us, right?"

This seems like a lot of pressure when all she wants is to get some bread for her sister, but Katniss can't afford to upset the baker. Not when he's her best customer.

"Yeah," she finally says. "I'm sure they're good."

"Let us know." The baker winks down at her. "I know Peeta will be glad to have your opinion."

Katniss has never been so happy to leave the bakery before.

(But at least the witch wasn't there.)

* * *

The cheese buns are, Katniss decides after one bite, the best thing she has ever tasted. They are rich and salty and filling all at once, and Katniss eats one, then eats another, then wishes she didn't have to share them with her mother. But Prim loves them too. Her face glows as she eats, she savors each bite with tiny, fastidious movements, and when they are all gone, she wonders aloud if they could make anything like it with the tesserae grain and the cheese Lady provides them.

Suddenly, the cheese buns sit heavy in her gut.

Because this means she will have to go back to the bakery.

(It means she will have to talk to Peeta.)

* * *

Somewhere, in a room made of white walls grown fat with despair, a girl stares blankly ahead. She is tiny and shrunken in the middle of this colorless prison, her hands shaking as they make repetitive movements against the floor.

"Prim," she keens. "Prim. Prim."

The echoes of past screams fade and quiet, their impact made paltry in comparison to the grief soaking this name.

There is nothing in the world save for this room, and this whisper, and this broken girl with the blackened nails.

* * *

The nightmares have been worse lately, and Katniss knows why. It's been a week since the baker traded her the cheese buns. A week since she's known that she needs to go back and see Peeta (ask for a favor when she already owes him). A week that she's managed to put it off, deliberately ignoring the squirrels that chitter in the trees above her.

But today, there's nothing besides squirrels. She's not sure if it's her guilt that makes her miss everything else, or if it's just one of those days, but by the end of the day she has only one rabbit to take home (thanks to a snare Gale taught her) and three squirrels.

Time, then, to go back to the bakery.

Besides, she reminds herself, she owes the baker an opinion on the cheese buns anyway.

* * *

It's still early enough that Gale hasn't emerged from the depths of the earth yet, for which Katniss is thankful. Sometimes he likes to go with her on her trades, both to build his rapport with the merchants for the days when he brings meat to their doors and because he doesn't trust the townies. Bad enough she has to ask a favor, no need to do it in front of him and earn a lecture on how they're all out to get her (the baker in particular, toward whom Gale seems to hold a particular distrust on account of his generous trades).

"Katniss," the baker says when he opens the door. He's using his hushed voice, gives her his muted smile, and Katniss doesn't need to hear the shrill voice in the front of the store to know that the witch is there.

A stone plops heavy and cold to the pit of her stomach.

"I have a squirrel," she murmurs (she traded the other two to Greasy Sae down at the Hob), and offers it.

"Ah." He checks over his shoulder as he takes the squirrel, then seems to brighten. "How about a loaf of bread? We have extra of the rye."

"All right."

"Peeta," the baker says suddenly, making Katniss startle. "Get the bread for Katniss and take it out to her. And don't forget to ask her about the cheese buns."

From behind the baker, Peeta emerges, wiping his hands (are they shaking?) on his flour-streaked apron.

For the first time, Katniss wonders how often Peeta has been there, in the kitchen, hidden and silent, while she trades with his father.

(She wonders why he never speaks.)

* * *

The apple tree draws her gaze. She's loitering in the alley, waiting for her bread, but her eyes keep going straight back to the tree and the space just beneath it. It's thin and stunted, as everything in District Twelve is, but it's shelter enough from the rain.

"Katniss?"

She turns, surprised she didn't hear the door open.

Peeta's eyes fall immediately to the ground.

His mother is the witch. His skin is often adorned with black and blue and green, a canvas of pain. It would make sense to assume he's shy and timid because of those things, but she's seen him at school. He is always half-hidden by a pack of friends swarming around him. He's quiet there, too, but friendly and personable (or so she assumes, from tiny sidelong glances stolen while trying to avoid his attention). Always ready with a smile and a kind word for anyone he encounters. But here, with her, he is meek. Cowed. At school and in the square, she will feel his eyes on her from a distance, though when she turns, he is always looking away.

"Hey," she says (because she has to start somewhere).

"Sorry about…that." He waves a hand vaguely over his shoulder.

"It's fine."

His eyes fly to hers before he seems to catch himself and direct them back to the ground.

(Katniss is startled, her breath oddly ragged. She's never seen his eyes so close. She never realized before just how blue they are.)

"Anyway, h-here you go," he mutters, holding out a loaf of bread wrapped in paper.

Katniss stares.

Suddenly, she is back here and the sky is pouring rain and hunger is chewing through her flesh. And this boy is standing in the rain, watching her, _seeing_ her, and there is bread on the ground, muddy but hot, hot, hot in her hands and against her stomach.

Her hands shake when she reaches out to take the bread from him.

"Thanks," she manages to say (and she wonders if he knows that she's thanking him, always, for that day so long ago).

There's a smudge of flour on his cheek. It's placed so haphazardly, probably unknowingly—it marks the spot exactly where he'd borne a blueish welt the day after that rain-speckled bread.

Peeta shuffles his feet, then whirls and hurries back toward the door. She is watching him, waiting for him to disappear behind the door and this opportunity to thank him (_really _thank him) to slip away like all the rest, when he suddenly stops. He looks over his shoulder toward her (she thinks his eyes are resting on that same apple tree).

"Um…the cheese buns. Were they okay?"

He's oddly vulnerable. Strangely fragile. Desperately hopeful.

Katniss is uncomfortable and impatient and her skin itches with the need to flee. But he turns even further and actually, really looks at her. He's not tall, but he's sturdier than she remembers noticing before, broader and stronger.

"They were amazing," she says honestly. "Really, Peeta, they're the best things I've ever eaten."

His eyes shine as his lips curve into a smile. Smaller than the ones he throws around at school to everyone but her, it is wholly genuine (real enough to make her wonder if the bigger, shinier ones are fake) and sweet enough to make something catch in her throat.

"Thanks, Katniss," he says shyly.

The bread is hot, hot, hot in her hands.

* * *

She is halfway home when she realizes she forgot to ask him her question.

* * *

Sometimes, when the girl is hovering between that grief-drenched name and anguished screams, she sings. A croaking, throaty humming with words she croons but doesn't know, can't remember, can't process. Those are the times the walls lean away, these are the sounds they will not swallow up and retain and echo back to her in endless misery.

When she sings, the other voice falls silent. There are only her broken melodies and the intent silence of a listening ear.

* * *

Gale's happy. It irritates Katniss, who's tired and cranky and heavy with exhaustion. It's been days since she's had more than a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep. The nightmares are getting worse, bleeding even into her waking moments. The day before, Prim had asked her why she was singing a forbidden song under her breath.

"What's your plan for today?" Gale asks.

It's Sunday, his one day off from the mines. Katniss looks at him and tries to be happy with him. He only gets one full day out in the woods, only gets these few precious hours of relative freedom; she doesn't want to ruin it for him.

"Just hunting," she says shortly. (Why does he always try to talk to her while they're hunting? He used to remember the value of silence.)

"Going in to trade?"

"Just to the Hob. Prim needs new clothes."

He grimaces. "They outgrow them too fast."

"Posy can have her old ones." Katniss doesn't look behind to see him struggle to accept that. She has no doubt that he'll make sure something from his snare lines ends up in her bag, but she wishes he'd just take the clothes without quibbling.

(She wishes they didn't have to worry so much about debts owed and paid and owed again.)

"You guys want to come over to ours for dinner?" he asks after a moment.

She doesn't. She's tired. She wants to go home and curl up in bed around Prim and sleep without nightmares.

But Gale's happy, and that's rare.

"Sure," she says. "We'll bring some cheese and a rabbit."

"I'll have Mom make some of those crackers to go with the cheese."

"Sure."

They go back to silence, prowling the woods and hunting survival.

* * *

A corner of the bakery is just visible from outside the Hob. Katniss watches it for a moment before turning away with a shake of her head. She does need to go back there, needs to screw up her courage and just _ask _Peeta her one question. As soon as she gets it over with, they can go back to the way things have been forever (back to companionable silence and mutual avoidance).

But not today. Not on Sunday when Gale's around. She's not quite sure why, but Gale and Peeta don't coexist well in her head.

"Ready?" Gale asks.

"Ready," she says.

The bakery disappears, eclipsed by the Seam.

* * *

There's a tiny bit of cheese, wrapped in cloth and tied with ribbon, left on the table for her. Katniss's first reaction is a lump in her throat (because Prim is so kind, so _good_). But then (she can't help it) she finds herself calculating how much they could get for the little pieces of cheese Prim has left for her over the years since she first brought Lady home.

And then, worst of all, she remembers what she'd meant to do for Prim. The question she was supposed to ask Peeta. The favor on top of the debt she already owes.

Katniss pockets the cheese, firms her resolve, and heads for the woods.

No squirrel today, but two rabbits. With only a fleeting thought of what Sae would give her for the meat, Katniss ducks back under the fence and heads for the bakery.

For just an instant, she pauses beside the old and shrunken apple tree (shivers deeper into her father's jacket at the memory of cold rain). Snorting slightly at her own foolishness, Katniss closes her hand around the cheese in her pocket (a talisman against the specter of starvation) and steps to the back door.

The baker opens the door with his usual smile. "Katniss," he says loudly (she relaxes slightly at this proof the witch is absent). "You're early today."

"Actually…" Katniss swallows (tastes burned bread and walnuts) and tries not to peek around the baker at the rest of the room. "I was hoping I could talk to Peeta. About the cheese buns."

For some reason, the baker's smile grows wider. He looks absurdly pleased for no reason at all that Katniss can tell, especially since he says, "I'm sorry, I sent Peeta off on a few errands. I'll be sure to let him know that you're looking for him, though."

"No!" Katniss feels a quick burst of panic. "That's okay. I'm sure I'll see him around."

With a last awkward thank you, Katniss scuttles away.

At least, she tells herself, she tried.

* * *

That evening, when there's a knock at the door, Katniss doesn't even look up from the rabbit stew she's stirring. Patients come to her mother at all hours, none of them convenient.

"Katniss," Prim says, "it's for you."

"For me?" She looks over to the door (expecting Gale) and sees Peeta standing on the threshold, hovering nervously.

Vertigo makes Katniss suddenly dizzy. She feels as if the whole world has been suddenly inverted, herself in a kitchen with food on the table and Peeta out in the dark, the cold, uncertain of his welcome.

(She hates it.)

"M-my dad said you wanted to see me?" It's a statement, but he makes it sound like a question.

And he's still standing in the doorway (_him_, who saved them, who helped them, who ensured their survival).

"Come in!" she blurts out, just to destroy this unsettling tableau (to try to begin paying for those long ago loaves of bread). "Please. We were just about to have dinner. You can join us."

(It's the least she can do; the cheese was her lunch and the second rabbit is long gone, traded away for a few more necessities.)

Peeta stops mid-step, still near the doorway but at least inside where it's light and warm (he belongs near a hearth, she thinks fiercely, not out in the rain). "Oh, no," he says, "I'm sorry, I-I didn't know—I don't want to intrude."

He's reaching back for the door. There's a bruise on his wrist, peeking out from under the ragged sleeve of his jacket. _I sent Peeta off on a few errands_, the baker said, but maybe he only meant he sent him somewhere out of sight.

Katniss forgets her mom and Prim's eyes, surprised and wondering, on her. She forgets that she is afraid of talking to Peeta. She even forgets about the bread lying like a great gulf between them. In that moment, with the sight of his bruises and the shine of his golden hair out in the cold night, Katniss is completely overwhelmed by the sudden, searing desire to take Peeta and put him somewhere safe, somewhere no one can reach him and hurt him. (She imagines, for just an instant, absurd as it is, sneaking him to the woods, to her father's lake, setting him up in that tiny shack and feeding him dandelion salad.)

"Eat with us," she says, almost tersely, and pulls out a chair for him at the table.

Tugging his sleeves down self-consciously, Peeta sits. He keeps his shoulders hunched tight (makes himself small and as unobtrusive as a large merchant boy can be in their house) but smiles bright and wide at her mom and Prim.

"Thank you for having me," he says, as if this is a planned occurrence.

"Of course," her mom murmurs, and she sets out their single extra bowl and spoon.

"Katniss!" Prim hisses, and Katniss jerks her eyes away from the sight of those dishes (four places at the table instead of three; a man there, like before, but not really, not at all).

"It's just stew," she says.

"It smells delicious."

She has never heard Peeta speak so many words. His stutter is evening out, his eyes grow less wary (a contrast that makes her realize just how guarded he usually is), and gradually, as they dish him out a portion of their dinner, his shoulders straighten.

A knot in the pit of her belly (one she didn't even realize was there) loosens, just a bit, to see him here, safe, eating. (It's still a role reversal, but not as bad as the one before.)

Peeta is gracious all through dinner. Aside from a mention that he's never tasted rabbit before (Katniss regrets that second rabbit again), he eats the stew with every appearance of pleasure. He asks Prim about school and talks genially to her mom of the merchants she might remember. His eyes dart to Katniss, quickly and often, but he doesn't say much to her aside from complimenting the dinner with a gleam in his eye that makes her think he means for more than just stirring it.

(She tries not to care that they have no bread to offer him.)

When the dishes are cleared, her mom mentions that it's getting late. As if this is a cue he recognizes, Peeta immediately rises and begins buttoning his jacket. With each button, his body seems to remember the tension he let slip so temporarily until he is once more small and self-contained near the door.

"Thanks for dinner," he says to the room at large.

Katniss lunges for the door and opens it for him. "I'll walk you out," she mutters, then closes the door behind them (avoiding, for the moment, her family's curiosity).

"You don't have a jacket on," he observes quietly.

"I won't be long." But she crosses her arms over her chest anyway. It's colder out than she thought (she'll need more firewood, more coal, more blankets to keep Prim warm).

"I am sorry," he says, his voice as soft as the starlight. "I didn't mean to horn in on your dinner."

Katniss shrugs uncomfortably. "Don't apologize. I told your dad he didn't have to tell you—I never meant to make you come here—"

"I don't mind."

He sounds completely genuine, this merchant boy standing in air polluted by coal dust. His hair is haloed like light itself, brilliant against the black sky. His eyes are locked on hers, not falling away when she looks at him. It makes her feel nervous, to be the recipient of his total attention.

"Really," he says. "I…I couldn't figure out why you'd be looking for me."

(Is he waiting for gratitude? For that thank you she could never get out past awe and anxiety?)

"If you need something, I'll be more than happy to get it for you if I can."

Her eyes fly to his. (She wonders if things will ever change, because for all that their positions were reversed, it is still him offering her help with his flesh marked in pain.)

"I…" Katniss straightens (reminds herself this is a business deal). "It's about the cheese buns."

He blinks. "Oh."

"It's just that Prim loved them." Her words tumble out of her now, too fast, too unwieldy. "And she makes goat cheese, and we have tesserae grain, and I…well, I know it's a lot to ask, but I was hoping I could get the recipe. See if it's something we could try to replicate."

"Her birthday's coming up."

She begins to believe that he will never stop surprising her.

"What?"

"Prim's birthday." Peeta's lips curve up in a small smile. "You always try to get her something special."

How does he know that?

"Okay," he says before she can get the question past her shock. "I'll bring the recipe and I'll teach you how to make it."

"You don't have to," she mumbles, backing toward the door. "If you just tell it to me—"

"I'll show you."

It's strange, after all this time, to see him so decisive. So steady.

She firms her jaw, makes herself meet his eyes (refuses to show weakness). "I'll pay you. How many squirrels—"

"It's a gift."

Katniss scowls, her spine rigid, her fists clenched tight. "No. I'm not going to owe you anymore than I already do."

His brow crinkles, his eyes turning cloudy. "Owe me? What do you mean?"

"I'll pay you," she repeats, and then she darts inside the house, the door a barrier between any further haggling (between his questions and her revelations).

Her mom and Prim look at her expectantly.

(Katniss resists the urge to flee again.)

* * *

Surrounded by white walls, enclosed in the echo of her own screams, the girl's hands occasionally pause in their frantic movements. The black fingernails, the singed fingertips, the blistered palms, they still and fall motionless. The screams die away. The humming, singing, _keening_ fades until there's an oppressive silence.

Only in those moments, rare though they are, does the other voice take up where she left off. No screams. No songs. Just words. Silvery, clarion words that spiral and build and comfort, erecting beautiful constructs in her mind.

If ever this mad girl finds sanity, it is when the other voice weaves it for her.

But sometimes…sometimes, even in the silence, there is no voice.

Sometimes there are only matching screams.

* * *

The nightmares grow more detailed, more vivid, until Katniss wakes with her heart hammering in her chest like a rabbit's, thundering and fast, while her breath jackknifes through the bedroom. Something stirs next to her, a warm body, gentle hands, a quiet whisper.

"Katniss? Are you okay?"

Katniss tenses and whips around.

It's a girl. Young and beautiful and blonde-haired.

"Katniss?" she says, all sleepy and innocent, and Katniss's heart lodges in her throat.

"Prim," she says. "Prim, you're alive."

Prim would say more but Katniss pulls her into a hug so tight they both have to fight to breathe.

(Katniss tries not to wonder why she is so surprised to find her sister alive.)

* * *

She meets Gale in the woods. For the first time since that autumn day they met, Katniss is nervous when she sees him.

"Good day for hunting," he says, then shrugs on a sheath of arrows.

She means to tell him about her deal with Peeta—opens her mouth with a short explanation ready.

Her mind freezes, blurred by exhaustion (by a strange indecision). It is a good day to hunt, she tells herself, and if she tells Gale, he'll ruin it by getting angry and raising his voice to rant against the merchants (against _Peeta_).

Katniss closes her mouth, checks that her own quiver is secure, and glides forward soundlessly.

She will tell him later.

* * *

It doesn't occur to her until Peeta shows up on her doorstep exactly a week after their dinner that they never set a time for this baking lesson.

"H-hi, Katniss," he stutters, his eyes downcast as he shifts his weight from foot to foot. "Is now a good time for you? For the cheese buns?"

If she wants to surprise Prim, it's a great time. Both Prim and her mom left just over an hour before to assist in a birth. If she wants to keep her composure around Peeta, however, it's a terrible time. She feels suddenly very awkward to think of being alone in her house with Peeta.

"I can come back later?" he offers. He reaches his free arm up to run through his hair, dusting away snowflakes, and Katniss finds herself automatically scanning his wrist, his face, anywhere she can see, for bruises. Which reminds her that he's still standing in the cold.

"Now's fine," she says, and stands aside for him to enter. When she notices the basket he's holding, she scowls (she already owes him so much). "What is that?" she demands.

Peeta startles back a step, his shoulders hunching, and Katniss freezes in place. In the light of the house, away from the darkness so foreign to him, he seems brighter, more real, limned in gold. He shouldn't look anything but happy and healthy, certainly not frightened (not of _her_).

"It-it's some pans, mixing bowls, and measuring cups," he says. "I wasn't sure what you had."

"Oh." She doesn't think she's ever felt so ungracious in her life. "Sorry. I just thought…"

He stares at her, unblinking, waiting for her to finish the truncated sentence.

"I already owe you," she finally says (and wonders why it doesn't feel like enough, why it tastes like a half-truth).

"You really don't," he says quietly. "It's just a recipe."

"Your family's livelihood is recipes," she retorts, abruptly irritated with his kindness (or is it just obliviousness? has he forgotten the bread? did it mean anything at all to him?).

"I made this one up and we can't afford the cheese for it often, so it will mostly go unused."

Katniss gapes at him. "What?"

"We can only afford to make the things people will buy." Peeta shrugs and sets the basket down on the table. "Most people just want bread."

"But what about the cakes? The cookies?"

"Sure, if anyone's going to save up for something and splurge on it, they want the sweet stuff. The cheese buns just don't have that big a draw in comparison."

"They do to me," she offers, her voice hardly more than a whisper.

His smile is small but radiant (genuine and warm). "I know. I'm glad."

He seems bigger, broader, his eyes bluer, his words more assured, his expression more composed. It's strange, the way it always seems to take a few minutes for him to come into focus, as if she sees only a dim reflection of him before she blinks and he resolves into who he really is.

"I probably should have given you a list of ingredients before I showed up." A crease forms on his brow as he looks down at the basket. "But I guess we can experiment."

Katniss's stomach twists unpleasantly. Prim deserves every good thing, of course, but they can't afford to _experiment_ with food. As much as the woods provide, they only ever have just enough, not extra to throw away on multiple servings of makeshift cheese buns.

This might have been a mistake.

But Peeta's already pulling out his measuring cups and a few pans, a mixing bowl, some small containers he sets aside without opening. "Do you have flour?" he asks.

Nothing for it now. He's intent, resolved, determined in a way she's never seen in him before (except maybe once, hazed through rain and blurred by starvation).

"I'll get it," she says, and retrieves the coarse tesserae flour.

For all her trips to the bakery through the years (for all the times she's stolen glimpses of Peeta), she's never actually seen Peeta bake. He brings a single-minded intensity to it that reminds her of herself in the woods. His eyes are sharp behind long lashes, his hands steady and strong, his movements so economical and purposeful that it draws (and keeps) all of her attention. She finds herself staring openly, unable to look away. And though he speaks often (a deep voice she finds inexplicably familiar, disconcertingly soothing), she doesn't take in all the details he's imparting, the measurements and order of process and heating temperature. Instead, she memorizes the way he looks as if there are whole unknowable worlds spinning behind his expressive face and blue eyes.

His 'experimentation' turns out to all take place before they even add the cheese. He sifts his fingers through the flour, weighs the dough in his burn-scarred palm, adds a pinch of something from one of those containers he tries to keep hidden behind his broad form.

Finally, almost too soon, they have six buns wrapped around Prim's precious goat chest, resting in the oven on a couple of Peeta's gleaming pans.

Peeta turns back to his basket (Katniss is beginning to think it has unlimited space within) and pulls out an index card and a pen. "If these turn out," he says, "we'll write down the final recipe."

Katniss jerks her eyes up to his. "They might not turn out?"

They already smell so good (maybe the most delicious smell her house has ever hosted since that long ago new year's orange), and she already has images of Prim's excited laughter dancing in her head. And, of course, there is no more cheese to try again.

"Well…" Peeta shifts his weight. "They should. I think they will. But usually a recipe takes a couple tries before it's perfect."

"Oh." Katniss relaxes. "It doesn't have to be perfect, just edible."

Peeta regards her for a long moment, so long that Katniss belatedly realizes she just insulted all his effort and the care he took that she mostly just tuned out.

"I mean," she adds quickly, "I'm sure they'll be fine, but…well, it's tesserae flour, after all. It won't be as good as what you're used to."

His lashes (long and dusted with a few grains of flour that make her fingers itch to reach out and brush away) fall to conceal his eyes. "Right," he says with the suggestion of a snort. "Us merchants are really living it up over in the Town two steps away from the Seam."

She scowls. "You don't make your breads with sub-standard flour, do you?"

"No, I don't. But we have to make enough to afford that flour, which means I don't eat 'my' bread."

"What?" Her hand stills in the swirl she's been making in the flour residue left on the table.

Peeta takes a deep breath before he looks at her, his expression as bland as it is at school when surrounded by that faceless crowd of blond kids. "Nothing. Forget it."

"Why don't you eat your own bread?"

"I do." He shrugs, all his focus seemingly needed to line the pen up precisely with the edge of the index card. "We do get to eat the bread once it's too stale to sell. And I'm thankful for it, really. It just…it bothers me that everyone seems more than happy to hold onto meaningless prejudices. Merchants disdain coal dust; Seam folk scorn perceived riches. Why can't we all just help each other out no matter what color eyes we have or where in District 12 we live?"

Katniss has listened to hours and hours of Gale ranting about similar things out in the woods. But somehow, in some way she can't explain, these few words, spoken so evenly, so softly, mean more than all those angry lectures.

"You help," she says quietly to the flour coated over her fingertips (she has the sudden mental image of drawing it over his cheek, where that welt once lay, as if the pale dusting can allay the wound he took for her sake). "You're helping me now."

"Yeah, but you said you'd pay me." There's a wistful note in his voice she's never heard before. "So it's still more about debts and lines not being crossed than freely helping."

It takes all her courage, plus the memory of him standing on her cold doorstep a week ago, for her to meet his eyes and say, "But you helped me before, when we were kids, and I never even said thank you."

Peeta's face drains of all color save two red spots at the crown of his cheeks. He clenches the back of their kitchen chair with white-knuckled fists. "Th-the bread? From when we were kids? But…but you shouldn't even remember that!"

Katniss feels her own face burn, though she does her best to off-set it by frowning. "How could I forget? Peeta, that bread saved our lives."

"But…" A shadow passes across his eyes as he gives a short shake of his head. "I just threw it to you. It fell in the mud. That's…that's not really kind _or_ heroic. I should have—"

"Don't. Don't say that. That bread was the first food we'd eaten in… It meant everything. And then, when I saw you at school, there was a dandelion."

"A dandelion," he repeats. Seriously. Intently. He's listening to her, actually taking in her stumbling attempt to explain how he made her world turn from dark to light. (She wonders if his focus on her brings up that same look of hidden worlds, but can't bear to look up from the flour on her finger to find out.)

"Yes," she says. "A dandelion. You can eat them, you know. They're very nourishing, and they grow everywhere, even in the places nothing else survives. Anyway, when I saw that dandelion, I remembered the woods and everything my father taught me. But it was only because of the bread." Her voice drops to a whisper. "Because of you."

"You would have seen the dandelion anyway," he says in a strangely hoarse voice. "You're so strong, Katniss. You would have found a way to survive."

"No!" She takes a frustrated step nearer him, her hands reaching out as if to actually grab hold of him (to ease his grip on that chair and protect him, from his mom, from this world, from his own self-deprecation). She's not explaining this well, and she hates trying to find the right words for things too big to be confined to a few sentences. But it's anathema to her that Peeta _not_ know how much he helped her, that he saved her and Prim, that his kindness is what made that dandelion so important (it makes her whole chest ache, to think of that bruised little boy condemning himself all these years for throwing the very bread that was her salvation).

"Peeta," she says brokenly, "you…you were the dandelion. You helped me when no one else would, and that…that's what made me find a way for us to live. Because if there was still kindness, still good things left in the world, then…then it was worth it to survive."

For a long moment, there is silence broken only by her ragged pants, her body wrung dry of any more words. Peeta's speechless (and she only heard his voice for the first time a few weeks ago, and he stutters and stumbles every time they talk, but for some reason, it seems momentous to her that she has brought him to silence).

"Katniss," he finally whispers, almost helplessly.

And then they both jump as the little timer he brought chimes once, twice, four, eight, twelve times.

The cheese buns taste amazing, so much better than she thinks they should (deep down, buried beneath realism and pragmatism, a part of her half believes that Peeta's touch is somewhat magic, able to transform mud and rain into walnuts and raisins and tesserae grain into white flour). Peeta watches her eat that first cheese bun, and with each bite, his hands relax a bit more until, finally, he lets go of the chair altogether.

"Aren't you going to have one?" she asks when her mouth isn't full.

His eyes dart away from her mouth (she brushes at it with her sleeve in case he was staring at crumbs) and down to the index card where neatly scripted words flow (like magic) from the pen to the paper.

"No," he says. "This way, there's two each for you, Prim, and your mom."

"Take one." Katniss sets her jaw and plunks her second bun in front of him. "As a thank you."

The cheese bun sits between them. More words appear on the card as his fingers direct the pen. No, not words, a doodle of six tiny cheese buns on a plate, steam wafting up from them. A knot forms and tightens in the pit of Katniss's stomach (over and over again, he gives her food, and over and over again, she has no way to give back to him).

"Please," she whispers (she hates herself for her weakness, for the crack in her voice, for the sudden desire she has to reach out and…and…do _something_ with him, _for_ him).

"All right," Peeta finally says. And he sets down the pen. Picks up the cheese bun. And eats it.

(Katniss turns away under the pretense of cleaning up their mess before she can do something stupid, like cry just at the sight of this boy eating.)

When there are only four cheese buns left, placed prettily on a plate, Peeta begins to pack everything back up in his basket. Katniss watches her flour swirls disappear beneath her rag until there's nothing left to do but watch Peeta place a towel over the cheese buns and pick up his basket.

"Katniss," he says softly, "please don't feel like you have to thank me or pay me back for the bread. For anything. Knowing that you're alive, seeing you okay…that's payment enough, all right? That's all I want."

He's so earnest, so sincere, that she can only nod, and is rewarded for it with one of his small, _real_ smiles.

"Here you are." He offers her the recipe card, and by the time she looks up from the life-like picture, he's already at the door. "Goodbye, Katniss."

(It sounds so final she can't return the sentiment.)

Then the door closes between them and she's alone.

Katniss runs her fingers over the ink words Peeta formed and stares at the covered plate.

* * *

The other voice doesn't scream as much anymore. The girl in the engorged walls is glad of it, one tiny thing to be thankful for in this place of endless nightmares.

But then, as the walls grow so glutted they cannot echo agony back, she realizes, somewhere between her own screaming and her grieving, that the other voice isn't speaking as much anymore either.

The silver clarion sound that builds up sanity for her has a fleck of rust, a dulling of dust, a chip along its edge.

Her fingers still spin, ceaselessly, roaming, searching for something she cannot find, but she lets her own voice quiet and fade so she can listen harder, better, more.

Not that it matters.

Hope is never rewarded, and nothing good ever lasts. Not in here, and not out there.

* * *

Prim is ecstatic to receive the cheese buns and can hardly believe she gets two whole ones all to herself.

"Two for you, two for me," she says gleefully, and Katniss smiles.

"And more later," she says, offering her the recipe card. Prim shrieks and kisses the card, then laughs at herself and sets the table as if it is a grand meal.

Katniss plays along because Prim should always be this happy, this pure, this safe.

With knives and forks and affected manners, they make the cheese buns last for nearly an hour, savoring each bite while Prim makes plans for more cheese.

Once, Katniss finds herself staring at the third chair at the table, as if she thinks someone should be sitting there. But Prim laughs, and Katniss's eyes swing automatically to her so she can drink in the sight of her joy, and Katniss forgets why anything should seem wrong.

It's her and Prim against the world. It's always been her and Prim. It will _always_ be her and Prim (even if the rest of the world burns).

"Happy birthday, little duck," she says when the last crumb is gone.

"Thank you, Katniss!" Prim throws her arms around her in a buoyant hug. Katniss holds on (and knows she will never let go).

* * *

A/N: I have no idea what this is at all. It's an odd mix of things and it would. not. leave. me. alone. So here we are, almost thirty thousand words and four chapters later and hopefully there's something in this mess that is worth reading. As always, it's all because of my absolute and unending love for the Hunger Games, with thanks to my sister who beta-ed it for me and who got me into the fandom in the first place. Thank you for reading, and I'd love to hear what you think of it!

No copyright infringement is intended!


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Thank you so much for all the reviews and favorites! I do mean to reply to each individually because they really do mean so much to me, but for now, I'm trying to focus all my time and attention on actually finishing this story so none of you have to wait too terribly long to find out what's going on! Thank you, and I hope you all enjoy the second chapter!

* * *

"Prim have a good birthday?" Gale asks the next day.

Katniss smiles, both because she is in the woods and because the memory of the night before is a sweet one. "A very good one," she says.

"What'd you get her?" he asks as they retrieve their bows from their hiding places.

And Katniss's smile disappears. She meant to tell him about her deal with Peeta (about the gift Peeta gave her, because there isn't a deal, not really, not anymore). But somehow, the words never came, and now…now what does it matter? It's over and done with and telling Gale will change nothing.

"A treat from the bakery," she says.

Gale's eyes narrow, but then he smiles (thinking of cookies and cakes, not knowing about cheese buns to even consider them). "Prim always has loved the pretty things."

"Yeah." Katniss settles her quiver and lets him believe the lie.

It makes both of them happier.

* * *

A few days later, Katniss takes her squirrel to the bakery's back door. She chances a quick look to the apple tree, but the bulk of her attention is on the front door. She wonders if Peeta will be there, hiding behind his father's frame. She wonders if he will speak, or if everything will go back to the way it was before his new recipe. (She wonders if the witch will be there and if Peeta's skin will once more be marked with pain.)

Peeta opens the door, wiping his hands on his apron.

For a moment, they both stare at each other, Peeta with an unreadable expression, Katniss in surprise. It has always been the baker who opens the door, who comes at her knock and barters to give her the most of what she earns.

"Katniss," Peeta says, then, his voice soft and low and soothing.

Katniss blinks, her cheeks warm, and looks down. "I…where's your dad?"

There's an audible catch to his breathing (out of the corner of her eye she sees his hand tighten over the edge of the door). But when she looks up, he's bland and polite and expressionless (everything hidden away behind a mask so skillful she's only just beginning to realize he wears one at all).

"I'm the baker," he says, and Katniss blinks because of course he is. He's the baker and he lives here alone and who knows if he has siblings or where his parents are because she won't ask, can't ask, they aren't friends, not really.

"Right," she says. "Sorry, I…sorry."

"It's fine. What do you have today?"

"A squirrel," she says, though she remembers him complimenting his first taste of rabbit stew and wishes she had one of those for him instead.

"Right through the eye." There's a touch of admiration in his voice; it's different from the stammer she's used to. "I'll get you a loaf of bread."

"Okay."

When he gives her the bag, she can tell there's more than just a loaf inside. But Peeta looks so pleased with himself (and she remembers him wishing so desperately that they could all just help each other out with no more thought of debts owed) that Katniss only offers him the wisp of a smile, and accepts it. (It's not charity, she thinks, so much as a pact between them, a secretive alliance to pretend the world isn't so full of divisions.)

She's halfway down the alley when Peeta takes one step out of the bakery and calls after her, "Katniss, have you made the cheese buns yet?"

"No."

"Oh. Well, make sure you remember the recipe, okay?" He pauses, shifts his weight, reverting back to the awkward boy she remembers from before he came to her house. "Just…you never know what could happen to a piece of paper. Better to memorize the recipe so you always have it with you."

"Okay," she says, and slips away before anything else strange can happen.

Besides, Prim will be home from school soon, and Katniss doesn't want her to be alone.

* * *

The nightmares chase her from hour to hour, long hazy montages of white walls and screams, of flames and loneliness. Hours before the sunrise, Katniss sits curled in on herself so she won't wake Prim (though why is Prim in here, sleeping on the same bed, when there is another bedroom empty just beyond the curtain?) and plays with her fingertips. She remembers them being blistered and singed, the nails black and edged with ash. But they're fine. Thin and callused and cold, but not burned. Not scarred.

They're her hands.

(So why do they seem like a stranger's?)

* * *

Without conscious thought, Katniss decides to head for her father's lake. It's been a while since she's been there and Prim has a patient to check on after school so she has extra time today. The weather's cooling but still warm enough for a few fish to take the bait if she's patient enough. There might even be some katniss roots to harvest (some memories of her father to take out and savor, just for an hour or two in private).

Between one step and the next, there is nothing.

She passes the rock where she and Gale meet, ghosts through the woods where his snare lines run, crosses the tiny stream where they occasionally fish, glides soundlessly forward toward the lake, and then…

Then there is nothing.

Her woods end. Abruptly. Without warning. A tree sliced cleanly, vertically, down the middle.

Katniss stares at the boundary and wonders when this appeared. If this is another fence, more impenetrable, more terrifying, than the wires with their cut power.

She wonders if someone is watching her from the other side.

One thing is certain, though. There is no lake anymore, no ducks, no fish, no katniss roots. No little cabin or reminders of her father.

The feeling of loss is as abrupt, as sharp, as the line through her woods. This is supposed to be her refuge, her haven, inviolate and sacred and _hers_.

And now it has been defaced. Invaded. Ravaged.

Katniss turns and goes back the way she came, first at a steady walk, then in a heedless run. She's desperate to get back inside the fence, to find Prim and make sure that she is safe, still here, still alive, still _hers_. She is in such a hurry that she almost forgets to hide her bow and arrows, has to turn and shove them inside the hollow log, then dive through the fence so fast that she feels a tug and a sharp pain in her scalp where she leaves hair behind.

But Prim is there, just leaving school, surprised to see Katniss but still ready with a smile in greeting.

Hugging Prim tight, feeling her heart hammering in her chest, her throat, her fingertips, Katniss decides that it's all right if her woods are gone. It's okay if the table seems empty and she's met with a feeling of surprise when there's no one she knows at the Hob and Gale lives alone and Peeta's the one who opens the bakery door. She's okay with anything as long as Prim is here, safe in her arms.

* * *

The neighboring voice stammers now. It's weak and slow, and in strange turnabout, it makes the girl in the white walls listen more closely. It used to weave stories for her, used to build whole worlds in the air before her, holding back the hunger of the walls by feeding it something different from their screams.

Now, there aren't any more stories. Now, there are only apologies.

"I'm sorry," it says, over and over again. "I'm sorry. I never saw the woods. I don't know…I can't picture them anymore. I can't remember… I'm sorry."

She hums. Songs she can't remember, songs she doesn't know, songs she makes up. Anything to take away the despair from that voice. Anything to banish the silence that takes the place of his screams.

"Katniss," the voice whispers, and the girl shrinks away.

She's no one. She's nothing. Because…because…

"Prim," she keens, and everything fades away while flames singe her fingertips.

* * *

"Katniss," Peeta says when he opens the door to her knock. He seems relieved to see her, a tiny sigh following on the heels of her name. "I was hoping you'd come."

"Of course I came." She tilts her head. "You're the only person I trade with."

"Right." A flicker of something dark passes across his eyes, shading them nearly black (she thinks it's guilt, but that makes no sense).

"Just a rabbit today," she says as she hefts her game bag. It's harder and harder finding food out there; the blank spots are spreading, her forest shrinking. (Soon there won't be any woods left to wander, but Katniss's mind shies away from that possibility.)

"Come in and I'll get you some bread." He swings the door wide open and disappears into the kitchen.

Katniss hesitates on the threshold. She's never been invited in before, never set foot into the warm kitchen. Still, Peeta is there, busy wrapping what she's sure is more than just a loaf of bread for her. And it smells so good, scents so enticing, so mesmerizing, that she takes two steps in just to fully inhale. It smells like cinnamon, like dill, like hope and wonder and a full stomach.

With heavy steps (that seem almost uneven, staggered, as if one foot is different than the other), Peeta stops in front of her. The scent of cinnamon and dill grows stronger, and Katniss almost takes a step back as she realizes why the smells of the bakery are so familiar. (_Peeta _smells of this, food and hope and dandelions and sunsets and all kinds of other things that don't have a smell at all but hang heavy and comforting in the air around him. Peeta is the reason this place smells so familiar, so welcoming.)

"Thank you," she mumbles as she takes the (too-heavy) package from him and tucks it into her game bag.

"How are you?" he asks, strangely somber. "I know things have been…strange…lately. But you're still okay, right?"

She frowns up at him. This seems an odd question from someone she's only spoken with a dozen times (but they must have spoken more, surely, if he's been the one answering the door for her all these years). "I'm fine," she says shortly. "Prim and I are both fine."

His eyes darken again, his pupils widening, swallowing up the blue. "Katniss," he says—

* * *

"Katniss," the voice says, from beyond her four walls, from the next four walls over, a cell just for him, white and bright and colorless. "Katniss, I'm sorry. I wish…I wish I could do more."

The girl who is not Katniss because there is no Katniss without Prim shrinks away from him. She closes her eyes on the smoke swirling up from her skin and tries to imagine the woods. Green trees and quiet animals and a fence that never buzzes. A house small and patched but comfortable and comforting. A sister alive and whole and happy.

But she can't imagine it, not on her own. The images slip away from her, leaving her just a small, not very pretty girl huddled up in ashes and chains.

She whimpers, and the voice relents.

His apologies fade away as he weaves a forest around her.

* * *

Katniss wavers and would have fallen if Peeta didn't reach out to catch her. She grasps at his arms, blinks to feel his hands steady on her shoulders, and lets him help her to a tall stool against the island covered in doughs of different colors and consistencies.

"Here, sit down," Peeta's saying, fetching her a cup of water, tugging her stool closer to the heat of the ovens, clasping her shoulder when she feels the world tilting around her.

She's never had the nightmares while awake before. They've stolen her sleep and haunted her nights, but she's always been able to escape them during the daylight hours. But if they can strike anytime, can find her even in the bakery, can erode what little is left outside them…it terrifies her.

Somewhere very far distant, she can hear a voice murmuring soothing words, a litany of things to be grateful for. "You're okay," it says, "everything's all right. You still have your woods, and Prim's safe, and there's food."

The voice is a part of her nightmares, sometimes screaming, sometimes speaking, telling stories or making apologies, always welcome, never as strong as she would wish.

At first, Katniss thinks the nightmares have taken her again, snatched her away from the bakery and whisked her away to that colorless prison.

But then, gradually, little bit by little bit, she recognizes the voice.

"It's okay, Katniss," Peeta is saying. "Look, I'll bet there are squirrels out there right now, relieved that you've gone home for the day so they can come out of hiding and stock up on some more nuts. And the rabbits are there, probably still shaking from their close call with you. But you have enough today, right? Food for Primrose and for you and a bit leftover to trade for something extra."

She knows this voice. It stammered and stumbled the first few times she heard it here (but in her dreams, it was always strong, always steady, steadfast and enduring). It grew stronger and more confident the more she got to know him, to remember him and to learn him (but the nightmares are reversed, because it grows weaker there, slurring words and trailing off into exhaustion). It says her name there and here, and only when she's heard them both together have her waking and sleeping worlds collided.

"Peeta," she rasps through lips so stiff and dry they crack at the merest movement (except, no, they aren't cracked, aren't dry at all because Peeta just gave her a cup of water to drink).

Peeta here.

Peeta there.

The baker who answers the door, who lives alone.

The voice in the next cell over, trapped and tortured at her side, unseen but never unheard.

Peeta's in her nightmares.

Something cracks and strains inside her. He's so kind, so gentle, so _good _(like Prim), but she has taken him and twisted him into anguish and torment, has inserted him in her nightmares (where even Prim is gone) just so she won't be alone. It's so cruel, so needlessly unfair, that Katniss actually has to bite her (dry; moist) lips to keep the tears from spilling over onto her cheeks.

"I'm here," he says, and of course he is. This is where he lives, where he belongs (the exact opposite of where he is in the nightmares).

"Peeta," she says again, an apology (incoherent and inchoate so that he will probably think she is crazy if he doesn't already) ready to spill from her mouth. And then she sees it. There on his wrist where his sleeves are rolled up, where his hand rests on her shoulder to keep her upright.

A bruise. Dark and deep and lined with welts where the skin has broken.

Without even thinking about it, Katniss snatches his hand up and cradles it in both of hers to examine the bruise. "Where did you get this?" she demands.

(There was a witch who did this to him, but that makes no sense because Peeta has no family, he is alone, and anyway, witches only exist in fairy tales and other stories that only people like Prim or maybe Peeta ever bother with.)

Peeta's breath catches in his throat. She can see the pulse jumping in his throat, can feel the panicked beat of it in the wrist her fingers trail across. Is he afraid of her?

Katniss releases him as if his flesh has scalded her.

"It's nothing," he says, staring at her with wide eyes. "Really, it doesn't matter."

"It matters," she says, quietly (so she won't frighten him) but fiercely (because whoever did this deserves to be more than frightened). "It matters, Peeta. It always matters when you're hurt."

He swallows. "Because of the bread?"

It's Katniss's turn to stare. Her turn to reach out and touch his shoulder as if to steady him (though he hasn't wavered like she did). "No," she whispers in the space between them. "Because it's you."

She doesn't think he understands her (she doesn't know if she understands herself), but he smiles anyway. The ghost of a smile that changes the shape of his lips and makes Katniss suddenly warm and hazy.

She's never felt this way before. It's strange, different, startling.

So she does what she always does. She jumps from her perch of safety and flees to her familiar places (Peeta lets her go, does not grab her or hold her here or call her back to his side, just steps aside and watches her run). She goes to the meadow to collect dandelions (wishes she could bring them to her dreams and shove them from her cell to dream-Peeta's cell so that there's color there for him to look at, food for him to smell). Starts a stew to feed Prim dinner. Helps Prim with her homework.

And prays the nightmares don't strike again.

* * *

Her days seem strange and wispy, almost undefined. While Prim is there, waking in the mornings and insisting on a bit of breakfast, fussing over Buttercup and checking on Lady, everything is crystal-clear and diamond-sharp. Prim's smile and her hair and the way her shirt rides up in the back until Katniss teases her with a long outgrown nickname.

But when Prim is gone for the day, when the house seems unusually empty, Katniss heads for the woods. She avoids the blank spots and hunts, always bagging just enough for dinner and a trade. When she heads back into town, she finds her steps turning to a large soot-covered warehouse (the Hob? she doesn't know where the name comes from, but it sits in her mind whenever she catches sight of the place). When she catches herself, she turns back to town, heads to the square (though she can't remember why it's called that, when there's only the bakery there, standing alone and isolated amidst an empty space).

Peeta always answers the door. He always asks her how she's doing. She thinks there is more he wants to say, can see it hovering there at the tip of his tongue. But she always makes sure to tell him she and Prim are doing fine, and as if the words are some sign, he swallows back his words and lets his eyes fall away as he packs up her bread (and cookies or biscuits or cheese buns). Occasionally, he asks her if she's memorized the cheese bun recipe yet.

"Why do I have to memorize it?" she asks him once. "You wrote it down for a reason."

"Just in case," he says as he avoids her gaze. His hands are coated in flour, like usual (she thinks of the flour she found on her father's jacket the day she went home after the waking nightmare; she remembers the long moments she sat there and stared at this proof of his hands on her, this reminder that he was there to help her even though she caged him in her dream). "I know you love cheese buns, Katniss. I just want you to be able to have them no matter what."

"Well, I haven't memorized it yet," she says, and slips away.

Then it's back home where she doesn't remember trading for the shingles to fix her roof or the wires necessary to repair Lady's pen or the string Buttercup plays with or the medicines Prim uses to tend to the patients Katniss never sees, but they're all there. Prim gets back from school and sometimes she doesn't have to leave; sometimes she stays, and Katniss gets to savor her jokes and smiles and laughter, gets to braid her hair and help her with her schoolwork.

Every Sunday, like clockwork, Gale meets her in the woods. He never mentions the voids swallowing up the forest, so she doesn't either. (There's a lot she never mentions to Gale). For some reason she can't explain, she waits for him each Sunday morning with a feeling of dread in her stomach (as if he will not come). Every time, when he appears, she sags in relief (and then wonders why, wonders what she's so afraid of).

He never talks about his family (she doesn't think he has one), but he asks her about Prim and then hunts silently at her side (she is not alone, at home or here), and so Katniss is content.

In this way, the days pass as the winter creeps closer and closer. Katniss shrugs deeper into her father's jacket and notices that the coal for Prim's fire never seems to die out and always, there is just enough for her in the woods.

She would question it, she thinks, but she can't. Whenever she does, the nightmares remind her that there is a worse place, a worse fate, a worse prison. So she lets the surreal strangeness exist, and does not look too closely at the blank spots swallowing up her tiny world.

* * *

"What do you most want to remember?" the voice asks her from the neighboring cell. "Besides Prim, what's most important to you?"

The girl thinks of her woods, of the elusive sense of freedom. She thinks of Gale at her side, soundless and passionate. She thinks of a mother she can barely remember and a father she can do nothing but remember. She thinks of the songs that are her constant companion, rattling inside her head and pouring from her lips. She thinks of birds in the sky and bread in the rain.

"Pick one," the voice says. It's shaking, trembling, teeth chattering between each word. There's something wet there, liquid and bubbling, as if it's more than questions dripping from his mouth.

(Peeta, she thinks. Peeta, Peeta, Peeta, here where he shouldn't be, should never be, doesn't deserve to be.)

"The bread," she whispers, maybe the first words she's said in these walls that isn't _Prim_. "Kindness and the consequences of it."

The voice falls silent for a long while. The girl goes back to playing with the smoke that curls around her hands, the blisters that singe her palms.

"You already remember that on your own," he finally says. "What else? What memory do you want to keep?"

(The bread is seared there in her mind, and for just an instant, she thinks the smoke in her palms shifts to resemble the burned loaves.)

"Dandelions," she says. "One dandelion at my feet. I plucked it, and then I could eat. I only saw it because…because of him."

"You told me," he says after another long silence. "But you know that, too. What do you want to remember?"

Anything but screams. Anything but a sister turned into a living torch. Anything but these deadening walls.

"Mockingjays," she whispers. "They can fly free. They can't be trapped."

"Mockingjays." Now, for the first time in so long, there is a smile in that voice. "I love mockingjays."

And then he tells her a story.

* * *

Peeta almost always invites her into the bakery now. At first, she was hesitant (afraid of the nightmares; afraid that she would put him in them even more explicitly). But Peeta's kind and kind people have a way of rooting themselves deeply inside her. So she came in, tentatively at first, and now almost familiarly. As if they are friends. As if they are more than just a merchant and a hunter bartering and trading.

"The snow's really coming down out there," he says as he guides her to a chair placed between the ovens, the warmest seat in all of District 12, she's sure. He hands her a blanket and a mug of tea. Katniss sets her game bag aside and lets him wrap her in the blanket, lets her hands warm against the mug, hot and waiting for her as if he always knows exactly when she's coming.

"It might ease up in a bit," she says after a sip that burns the roof of her mouth. "There were some clearer skies to the east."

"Well," Peeta gives her a shy smile, "wait here a while then, in case it does. Will Prim be okay?"

"She's with a patient," Katniss says, and knows it to be true as soon as she hears the words (Prim has been gone, tending and healing and helping, more and more lately, leaving Katniss alone and lonely). "I'll stay, if you really want me to."

"I do," he says firmly (it always strikes her just how inverted her dreams and reality are, real-Peeta growing more and more resolved as dream-Peeta fades). "Please, stay. I have some leftover sandwiches from dinner."

"All right," she raises an eyebrow, "but no extras for the meat today, then. The sandwich will do."

He hesitates, obviously wanting to argue, but then smiles. "All right. Just for today."

It's late. Hunting took her longer than normal in the snow, and it's already getting dark outside. Rationally, Katniss knows it's smarter to hurry home now before the roads get slicker and the snow deeper. But she turns her face from the window with the white snow falling against a midnight blue sky, and sips her sweetened tea. After setting a plated sandwich in front of her, Peeta makes himself a cup of tea but, like always, doesn't add any sugar. Katniss smiles into the steam wisping up from her own cup, liking that she knows this about him.

"How was hunting today?" Peeta asks her as he turns back to the mixing bowl in front of him. The store's closed and she figures he's doing prep work for the morning now. Or maybe he's noticed she doesn't feel comfortable eating when he's not, so he makes himself busy while she devours the sandwich.

"Good," she says. It's an answer that would satisfy Gale, but Peeta turns from his yeasts to look at her expectantly.

She can't help the smile that grows as she answers him. "It was all right. The snow means most animals are hunkered down for the winter now, but there's always a few that are late. And sometimes, at the beginning of winter, the snowfalls are beautiful."

That's not something she ever noticed before. Or if she did, she didn't dwell on it, certainly would never mention it to Gale, both of them more concerned with survival than aesthetics. But Peeta's eyes glaze as if he's imagining it (he always does this, asks her and then tries to picture it, and she thinks maybe he draws it later), and he smiles when he envisions it, which compels Katniss to try to find something else to add to it.

"The snow lines the tree branches," she tells him, "so all the trees look like they've been frosted in ice."

"Frosted," he says with a chuckle. "Finally something I can understand."

"You would like it out there," she tells her half-empty mug. "I mean, you would find a lot more beautiful things out there than I do."

He watches her out of the corner of his eye (the way she watches him out of the corner of hers) before he shakes his head. "I'm too loud. I'd scare everything away."

"Some things aren't so easily scared off," she says, though she has no idea what she means. He _is_ loud, his heavy footfalls _would_ scare off all the prey she relies on finding. But she has a sudden image in her head, of helping him under the fence and guiding him under the heavy boughs of the trees, not minding his loud gait or the awe in his constant chatter, watching his eyes widen as he tries to drink in everything there is to be seen out there.

She wants it. Katniss seldom allows herself to think in terms of want or desire, but her heart actually flips over in her chest at this image and she _wants_ with a urgency she can scarcely control.

"I think I'm safer in the bakery," Peeta says as he covers his doughs to let them rise before morning.

"I wouldn't let anything happen to you," she promises.

It's almost as if that's the instant Peeta realizes that she's serious. He turns and faces her full-on, studying her intently. Katniss lifts her chin and doesn't look away (something tells her that if she does, he'll back off and never say another word).

"Okay," he says very quietly. "I trust you."

(And quite suddenly, Katniss is very afraid. Trust is a heavy weight to carry, a burden that could crush her, but not before it destroys him.)

"Well, sometime," she says, backpedaling even though she doesn't want him to realize it.

He does, though (he always sees the things she hopes, fears, he won't).

"When it's warmer," she adds. "The snow can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing."

"Okay," he says again. "Are you warm enough?"

She doesn't actually answer him, her attention caught on the bruises around his wrists. They're always there, sometimes weeping blood, sometimes just black and blue and green and purple (his skin turned into a canvas for art, colors taking the place of colorlessness). But today, she realizes as he steps closer to the fire, there are bruises under his eyes. And when he bends to pull a cake from the oven, a trickle of blood paints the space between his nose and his upper lip.

"Peeta, you're bleeding."

Quickly, he ducks his head away from her, sets the cake down, and lifts a rag to his nose. "Sorry," he says.

"What happened?"

(She always asks even though he never tells her.)

"It's nothing," he says (like she knew he would).

"Peeta," she says warningly, and can't figure out why he smiles at her in return.

"Really, I'm okay," he tells her.

"I wish I could put you somewhere safe," she hears herself say. Both of them are surprised by the comment. Katniss guzzles down the last of her tea just for something to do while Peeta stares at her in a shocked sort of silence.

"Not many places safer than a bakery," he says with his usual self-deprecation, but Katniss scowls at the lie. (Bakeries aren't safe, she's seen the bruises, the burns, the...the witch who…the mother who…well, whatever, they're not safe at all.) Still, he seems uncomfortable, in his polite way, so she lets the subject drop.

Without quite knowing how they got there, Katniss realizes there's a plate of cookies at her elbow. They're all crushed or broken or covered in smudged icing; since she's begun coming into the bakery on their trades, she knows that Peeta pretends he can't sell these ones. Her chest twinges at this additional act of kindness, but she takes his less-than-subtle hint and nibbles on a few pieces.

As much as she likes watching Peeta working, she usually doesn't really pay much attention to what he actually does, so it always surprises her when he stops kneading and she recognizes a braided loaf of bread or he pulls a pan from the ovens and she sees a set of perfectly sized cookies. Tonight, she blinks to see that he's been busy mixing what looks like different colors of frosting for the cake cooling on the counter. It doesn't surprise her anymore to see that intense look on his face, but it's still as mesmerizing today as the first time she saw it.

Guiltily, Katniss pretends to look at the plate of cookies while she stares. Here in the warm lights of the bakery, Peeta's lashes gleam with gold, longer than seems possible, so long she expects them to get tangled with every blink.

"What are you putting on the cake?" she asks (a way to pretend she's doing something more than just gaping at him).

"Something beautiful," he says with a wink.

She huffs and lets silence fall. Peeta's hands never waver, his movements never falter, he never pauses or second-guesses. It's extraordinary, the way his hands create beauty, the way his eyes radiate intensity, the way he can either make silence soothing or make conversation effortless.

Gradually, as the snow continues to fall outside, the cake is transformed into a forest. Brown trunks and slender branches, tiny sprigs of green grass poking up through white. When he begins to outline each branch in white, Katniss realizes he's recreating the scene she described for him.

"You have quite the imagination," she observes, her voice wavering just a bit.

"Maybe you have a way of describing things," he counters, "that makes it impossible not to see them."

Her eyes narrow as she tilts her head to examine the cake more closely. "No, I'm not good with words."

"You're better than you think. Besides," the tips of his ears turn pink, "you love the woods. And when you love something, Katniss, you love it with your whole heart. It's easy to see that when you talk about it."

Nobody's ever described her that way before. In fact, she's pretty sure _she's _never thought of herself that way. She's pragmatic and unimaginative, quiet and solitary, a practical survivor. But he speaks as if she is made to love, built to protect, inclined to nurture. It's as wonderful as everything he talks about (but probably as real as these woods he crafts of sugar and powder).

As the finishing touch, Peeta creates a mockingjay perched on one of the branches, a splash of black against the white. Another mockingjay joins it, flying free through the sky.

"Mockingjays," Katniss says in surprise. "I didn't say anything about mockingjays."

"Well, they're everywhere," Peeta says matter-of-factly. "The consummate survivors. You know, they were outside the school on our very first day."

"First day of what?"

"Of school."

Katniss can't help her little breath of laughter. "You can't possibly remember that."

"I do." Peeta concentrates very hard on the last few branches, so hard Katniss wonders if maybe the final touches are the most difficult parts. "My dad held my hand because he knew I was nervous. But when I saw you, I tugged my hand free to point at you. You were wearing a red dress and your hair was in two braids instead of one. My dad said that he had almost married your mother, but she ran off with a coal-miner."

"You're making this up," she says critically.

"No, true story." The branches are done, the cake looks finished, but Peeta doesn't look up, his hands poised over the frosting. "I couldn't believe someone wouldn't want to marry my dad, but when I asked why, he said that the coal-miner had a voice to make even the mockingjays stop and listen."

Katniss swallows hard. "That's true. He does. Did, I mean."

"Later that day, when the teacher asked if anyone knew the Valley Song, your hand shot straight up in the air. She stood you on a chair and you sang for us. And your voice was so beautiful that the mockingjays outside actually stopped singing. They all were listening to you as closely as I was."

She has no idea what to say. No idea what to do with this new information (this revelation that Peeta has noticed her and known who she is for so much longer than she knew, that he singled her out so many years before the bread in the rain).

"You have a remarkable memory," she settles for saying, and Peeta finally looks up from the cake.

"I was paying attention." He gives an awkward shrug, that focused look of his submerged beneath an odd nervousness. "I was always paying attention."

"Is…is that why you put the mockingjays on the cake?"

He starts tidying up the bowls of frosting. "I love mockingjays. But you can't catch them or tame them or ever hope to do more than catch a few glimpses of them. Maybe I frosted them because it's the only way I can ever hope to make them part of my life."

Katniss stands and begins folding the blanket he wrapped around her (she needs something to do with her hands so she doesn't reach out and make sure Peeta's actually real and here with her). "Maybe I'll sing for them one day, make them stop long enough for you to touch one."

His smile is sweet and shy and sincere. "But then they wouldn't be free."

"You wouldn't cage them, Peeta," she says softly. "You'd let them go when they wanted."

"I would." That odd wistful note is back in his tone, making her feel an odd combination of longing and unsettled. "But they don't always know that."

This conversation has ventured into territory she's not comfortable with, unfamiliar terrain that seems fraught with hidden pitfalls she's sure to fall into. Katniss sets the folded blanket on the chair and edges toward the door.

"I think the snow's stopped," she says even though she has no idea if it has or not. "I should probably head home."

"Yeah." Peeta's smile is almost sad, almost hopeful. He moves to open the door for her, handing over her game bag. The cold outside bites deep after the warmth of the bakery. "Be safe, Katniss."

"Good night, Peeta."

"Katniss," he says just before she steps outside. "Have you memorized the recipe yet?"

"No," she says, and disappears into the frosty night.

The bakery door stays open behind her, spilling out a shaft of light to guide her way until she is safely back to the Seam.

* * *

There's almost nothing at all left of her woods. Katniss hugs her knees to her chest on the rock overlooking the valley and wonders when this, too, will disappear. Ahead of her, where the valley should be, there is only a blank void. To her left another stands, a null where there should be trees and life and animals.

Gale materializes from the growing fog behind her and joins her on the rock. There's wire wrapped around his belt, everything he needs to repair any downed snare lines, but he doesn't seem to realize or care that the stump where he hides his bow is gone.

"Hey, Catnip," he says.

"Hey."

"Good day for hunting?"

"Where do you go?" she asks him.

"Thought I'd check the snare lines."

"No." She turns to face him, willing him to see the desperation in her face so he'll know how important this is. "Where are you when you're not here?"

His brow wrinkles. "The mines," he says. "You know that."

"Yeah, but…where are the mines?"

He laughs at her. "Underground, Catnip, like they've always been."

"And when you're hunting…" She bites her lip, so afraid of his answer (too afraid to know, too afraid _not_ to know, so she asks and hopes he won't answer). "When you're hunting, Gale, where do you go?"

She's looking right at him, straight into the face that could be a masculine reflection of hers. Gray eyes and dark hair, slender and muscular, strong and determined, as easily impassive as overruled with passion. She's looking right at him so she sees when he disappears. Just fades, as if made of fog, then evaporates like the sun has burned the mist away.

"Gale!" she cries, but the woods don't come back, and neither does he.

She's alone.

(She wonders, now, if she's always been alone.)

* * *

There's no more time to examine the charred tips of her fingers or the smoke that follows in her wake, not when she hears a cry of pain from a voice that used to be clear as a bell.

This isn't the cries of their nightmares (nightmares within nightmares, dreams within dreams, and who can ever know what's real in the arena of their lives?). It isn't the screams that pass for normal here. It's a cry of pain. A thud of something hitting flesh, a splatter of something liquid striking padded walls, a gurgle in throat and lungs that should be dry and clear. Another cry, another, and the girl isn't lying catatonic anymore. She's not huddled in a corner singing songs to herself, or splayed out over the floor keening for a corpse who was a sister.

No, she's up. She's moving. She's throwing herself at the glutted walls, savage and desperate and despairing.

"Peeta!" she cries (another kind of shriek, too, so many types of new today). "Peeta!"

Another thud, another cry, and she thinks of the white walls without the colors he loves, thinks of red blood against the white, white, white, and she screams and shrieks and yells.

"Peeta! Peeta! _Peeta!_"

There's a banging on her own wall, a warning to be quiet, but she can't. It's the only freedom she has in these four walls, to scream or cry or sing. Now, today, with all these new types of sounds, she adds to them by saying the name she'd forgotten in the maze of her agony.

Footsteps (her hands curl into fists smoking and hot). They pass and fade and disappear. Then there is only her, breathing harshly and on her feet. Her, and the soft, hopeless sobs from the next cell over.

Those walls, she knows, haven't had nearly the same amount of vocal torment to feast on as hers. They are hungry and they devour his weeping, lap it up eagerly, cruelly.

"Peeta," she keens, but she has keened and rasped and mourned before. He's the one who calms her, who speaks words of beauty and hope.

But his hope has been stripped from him. He is weak and hurting and maybe his walls are so close, so bright, they swallow up everything she tries to send him.

The girl presses close against her own wall, feels it shrink away from her, unused to a physical presence. She doesn't have a voice like his, cannot pick and choose words to paint into life for him. But she'll try. She'll do her best.

Prim, she thinks. Prim is everything that is good and right in her world. Only, Prim isn't _his_ world. Prim isn't his safe place, his refuge, his constant unending torment.

But what is his? What does he think of when the nights are unending and the lights are too sharp and the pain is unendurable?

"The bakery," she says. "Peeta, the bakery. It's warm there, right? There are ovens and…and different kinds of dough. It smells so good there, like cinnamon and dill. Like you."

He's still crying. Still unreachable. She can see him now, a boy who once was broad and strong now withered and shrunken down, too thin, too cold, too alone. Blond-haired and blue-eyed and with lashes so long she can't believe they don't tangle. He's probably as barefooted as she is, but if he were wearing shoes, the ties would be double-knotted, and if they were given tea, he would take his with no sugar, and even without nightmares, he can never sleep here because there are no windows to crack open.

"Peeta," she says, and she strains against the wall, presses her fingertips and _pushes_ until small black marks of char appear in the white padding. The wall groans…and Peeta's sobs hush for a moment.

"Peeta, remember the bakery," she says. "It's safe there, most of the time. You could live there by yourself and bake as much as you wanted and frost the cakes to look like snowy woods. There are mockingjays in the apple tree outside, and they crowd close because they know you will toss them leftover crumbs. They aren't afraid of you."

"Are…" He coughs, a wet cough that makes her insides shrivel and twist. "Are you there, Katniss?"

"Yes," she says (because she _is_ Katniss, as much of Katniss as is left over when there's nothing left for her but fire and flames and coal…and Peeta). "Yes, I'm there. Prim and I are both there. You keep us fed and warm and you always look out for us and you write recipes on index cards for no reason at all since you apparently think everyone should memorize them."

"Katniss," he says with a longsuffering note in his voice that makes her almost smile, "just in case, you should—"

* * *

"—you should memorize it," Peeta says as she stands in the kitchen. No game bag today, just her dad's hunting jacket and a few coins to buy some cookies for Prim, who stands in the front of the store to exclaim over the decorated ones. "You never know what—"

"What could happen," she finishes for him. "So you've said. But, then, why did you write it down at all if you just want me to know it by heart?"

"I thought you'd memorize it off the card," he says with a grin. "Obviously, I underestimated your stubbornness."

She smiles at him until she realizes he's too thin. He's shivering beneath his apron, his shoulders hunched tight, dark bruises under his eyes. She doesn't need to look down at his wrists to know what she'll see, but she does anyway because it's impossible _not_ to look when something so horrific is right there. The boy with the bread, _Peeta_, bruised and hurt. But there's more this time, blood staining his apron and a leg dragging unnaturally behind him. As she watches, his nose begins to bleed, a slow trickle that makes her bones seem leaden and cold.

"What just in case?" she asks him. "Why do you think I need the recipe?"

"Because…" His grin fades as he lifts a hand to staunch the flow of blood. Something breaks, there in his eyes, some last thread of hope he was hanging onto. She can see it happen, and almost cries out. "I'm not going to be here forever, Katniss. I won't always be there to make you cheese buns. But you love them. You're going to need _something_ to hang onto."

"I have Prim," she says numbly. She can hear Prim beyond the kitchen door, chattering away to a friendly baker who watches her with a kind eye and always has a favorable trade ready.

"Katniss," Peeta says, "I'm so tired." And he sags, stumbles, lets out a grunt of pain as he leans against the empty island. The cakes and breads and cookies are all gone. She can detect only the barest hint of cinnamon.

"Peeta!" She tries to catch him, but he's both too heavy and frighteningly light. Together, they manage to turn his fall into a controlled descent until he's on the floor leaned up against a counter, Katniss half supporting his weight.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I wish I could do more, but…I don't think I can. I promised I'd hold out until Prim's birthday, but that's…that's gone and past. And then I thought…I'd wait until you were okay being alone. But you just kept holding onto Gale. I don't think I can hold on anymore."

Katniss can't look away from the blood still trickling from his nose. His eyes look strange, blood vessels breaking and staining the blue. "You'll be okay," she says (begs). "You said you were fine."

"I lied."

The bakery flickers around her. The ovens are gone. Peeta's cold against her, trembling and unsteady, and the whole world seems wrong (Peeta's warm and steady and strong, _always_; he should be in near the hearth, not out in the cold). There's nothing around her, nothing but the tiny spot where she crouches beside Peeta and a single path leading to the sound of Prim's chatter.

"I'm sorry," Peeta says again. "Here."

He puts something in her hand. It's flat and light and dry, and she knows what it is immediately.

"No!" she snaps, and crumples the recipe up into a ball. "No, _you_ remember it, Peeta. You're the only one who can make them."

His lips twitch in a smile that almost makes her forget the blood he can't stop anymore. "Anyone can follow a recipe, Katniss. You'll be okay. You're the strongest person I've ever known."

"No, I'm not." She's breaking right now, cracking under the strain of holding him up in this vanishing pocket-world. But Prim's still talking, still laughing, still finding beauty somewhere, and Peeta's here in her arms, even if he is too small and too cold and too still. "Peeta, I told you, the dandelion—"

"You don't need dandelions. You have a bow."

"It's gone," she says (she's so selfish, even now, stricken at this loss while Peeta fades in front of her).

"No, it's not." Peeta reaches up and runs a careful finger down the line of her braid. A distant part of her mind notices that though he should stain it red, he doesn't. It remains dark and unaffected, like he's not even really here. "It's made of fire, Katniss, with arrows that can burn the world."

(Blonde hair catches fire and blue eyes melt and a sister becomes a ghost.)

"I don't want to burn the world," she tells him, like it's a secret, but one he's not surprised to hear.

"I know," he says. "But you can make it warm instead."

His frame is shuddering against hers, shivers that wrack his bones and make his teeth chatter, and still he looks up at her with complete trust, expecting her to be able to make the world warm and safe, as if she's as radiant as the sun.

"Peeta," she cries as his body turns faint and translucent. "Don't go. Stay with me."

He whispers a word, a quiet word that sinks deep inside her, but it's lost next to the panic that envelops her as he vanishes.

"Peeta!"

He's gone. The bakery's gone. She's alone. Alone in her house, standing in the bedroom and watching Prim fuss over Buttercup, that old mangy cat cuddled in her arms, turned limp and docile beneath her loving touch.

"Hey, Katniss," Prim says. She looks up at her with shining eyes.

* * *

In a different world, a girl presses her singed, singeing fingertips deeper into the smoldering holes made in her walls and cries and cries.

On the other side of the wall, left crumpled and forgotten, there is a boy who could make a world out of nothing but words. A boy who gave and gave until there was nothing left.

The girl wants to give back to him, she does, she does, she _wants_ with a fire that flares and scorches the air around her.

But flames took away her sister and burned her up. Flames swept through the hospital where Katniss slept and turned Primrose into nothing more than a dream and a nightmare.

Flames are Katniss's worst nightmare.

But they are also Peeta's salvation.

* * *

"Prim," Katniss says, and sweeps her sister into a hug. Buttercup's gone, probably with a yowl of irritation, Lady's outside somewhere and the woods are waiting for her and their mom is lying on a bed thinking of their father and Gale will hunt with her every day and…and…

"Katniss," Prim says, "you're crushing me. I can't breathe."

"I love you, Prim," Katniss says. "I loved you more than anything in the world. I would have let everything burn but you."

"I know you think that," Prim says, "but I don't think it's true. And it's okay, really. I love you too, but I don't think the world needs to pay for it."

"I wish—" Katniss stops then because she doesn't have time to list everything she would wish. She and Prim stand in a formless void, and she is absolutely certain that if she lets go of Prim, she will lose her forever.

* * *

The other cell is utterly silent. No screams. No cries of pain. No sobs.

No stories. No apologies. No words to make a better world for her.

Or rather, just one word left.

"Katniss," he whispers.

And Katniss screams.

(She's screamed before, denial and grief and despair, but this is different. This is rage and fury, undiluted, pure and whole and focused.)

The walls shake and tremble, their feast turned to poison turned to fire.

This is a song unlike any other. A song even the mockingjays wouldn't repeat. A song that no one hears because the boy who listened to all her clumsy words is dying. Dying because he wouldn't make her face the awful, cruel world alone.

Katniss's hands are gloved in red-gold swirls that sear the walls black.

* * *

"Prim," she says while she still can. "Little duck."

"It's okay, Katniss," Prim says, the words that Katniss has never been able to accept, the words she wishes she could have heard Prim say one more time.

"I'm sorry." Katniss gives Prim one more hug (knows how easy it would be to let this turn into another and another, except she knows that Peeta's dying and if she doesn't leave this place on her own, it will be snatched away from her regardless, just like it was before). "I love you."

And she lets go.

* * *

There is a place with four walls and another four walls beyond that, and beyond that, probably more, but the girl on fire only cares about one cell. One prison. One room. One boy.

The walls between them catch fire and erupt. The flames spread, as they always do, dancing and twirling down endless halls, burning away the doors and walls to let out other bruised and thin and haunted children who blink in the golden light before straightening and firming and marching forward to their own beat.

But in the heart of the inferno, at the birthpoint of the fire, there is a girl who thought she would never live again. A girl who steps from one cell to the next, as easy as lift and stride and fall, and kneels at the side of a boy. He's bruised and beaten, as are they all, but there's more, a self-inflicted wound that tears deep, deep inside his mind. An exhaustion that has hollowed him out and left him trapped in a world made of mist and shadow where nothing is real around him.

There's blood in his eyes and blood under his nose and blood coming from his ears, his mind strained and pressured and liquified by the magnitude of the world he created for her. A world where her sister lived and she was not alone and he saw himself in a cracked and dusty reflection, all stammering voice and clumsy step, relegated to the background. A world where he fixed all her problems but couldn't touch his own.

So Katniss does it for him. She puts her hand on his head, so cold and clammy, and warms him from the inside out. She stretches out beside him on the smoldering floor and presses her body flat against his until her heart beats against her breastbone trying to get to his, to replace his, to make his move and love and live again. She rests her forehead against his and lets her breaths feather against his mouth.

And she sings. A quiet, private song. A silly child's song. The Valley Song, that tune tucked far away in his mind where visions of a girl in a red dress and two braids stands on a stool and charms the mockingjays and baker's sons alike.

"Peeta," she sings. "Come back to me."

There are flames in her veins and she sends them out to his, lets her fire thaw his chill and enclose his heart in a protective shield and melt the ice from his lungs. She cauterizes the burst blood vessels in his brain and closes the wounds she can see and makes a pocket of warmth the way he made a pocket of a world.

And finally, finally, just when she is about to turn to ash and soot, he breathes. One breath, another, another, she counts until they reach twelve, and then she cries.

She cries because her sister is dead.

She cries because her boy with the bread, her boy with the voice, is alive.

Eventually, the other freed children find them. One boy (with eyes of green and a makeshift trident in hand) and a girl (with a mouth twisted in bitter defiance and two axes made of earth and wood) help Katniss lift Peeta and carry him toward freedom.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: Finally, some answers are finally coming our way! Thanks, as always, for the favorites, follows, and reviews - I hope you all enjoy this chapter! Oh, and there are actually going to be five chapters instead of four, but I'll try to post the next one sooner since it's all written now!

* * *

He wakes and falls and wakes and falls until he feels like he's the sea, surging with tides he can't predict, drawn by a force he can't understand. There are hands on him and voices above him and fabric below him and all around him is confusion. He aches and hurts and shivers, but why, why, why, there is no source, no cause, only the effects rippling through him in endless waves.

When this has been repeated this so many times that it becomes noticeable, a pattern and not just random occurrences, he remembers that he has a name (Peeta, whispered in a voice that can sing the mockingjays silent) and that he has a past (painful so that he flinches away from it and lets the tides wash him in their wake) and that there are expectations for his future.

"He should be waking soon," says one voice.

"If anyone will know, it'll be him," says another.

Even more confusing, one adds that, "His gift alone could win us the support of the last Districts," a puzzle so complex he gives up on it and consciousness alike.

But underlying all those others, there is a voice that tugs at something deep inside him, a low tone that sounds like a lullaby.

"Stay with me," she says, and so Peeta remembers his name.

"Stay with me," she says, and he remembers that he has nightmares when he sleeps and worse things when he wakes.

"Stay with me," she says, and he finally pulls himself, dripping and heavy, from the ocean to walk through the sucking sands of the shore toward true waking.

(_Always_, he wants to say, but his mouth doesn't move and his tongue is dry and his throat is full of dust.)

(_Always_, he wants to say, if only his mind would cooperate and show him anything but the terrors that prey on his unconscious mind.)

(_Always_, he wants to say, an urge he can't explain, can't quantify, can't fulfill.)

When he pries his eyes open to a room of white with four walls and a hard cot and machines beeping insistent messages, he wonders why he bothered at all.

(He wonders why, for all that he remembers that voice that sings, he cannot remember her name.)

* * *

A parade of visitors breaks the monotony of his drugged state. First, the doctors who surround him and let words drip, drip, drip from their mouths, words so full of syllables that they seep down through the floor before he can catch them and decode them. He doesn't mind too much. They frown a lot and look dire and sound somber, and whatever they have to say, he already knows the truth of it by the constant ache in his head and the catch to his breathing and the void where his leg should be.

Next comes a man who smells of alcohol and the past. Peeta thinks he should remember him, and knows he should when the man never thinks to tell him his name.

"Guess you're a bit messed up, huh?" The man takes a swig from a flask (the bitter stench intensifies, but it's almost familiar so Peeta doesn't shrink away) and shakes his head. "Should have listened to me when I told you she'd cost you more than she's worth."

The man is as bitter as the liquor in his flask. Peeta would turn his face away and shut his eyes on him, but he can't bring himself to. Just before the man leaves, he lets a hand drop, heavy and tentative, to Peeta's shoulder, strapped to the cot (for his protection, so they say, though why they bother when he can't even keep his eyes open for more than a few moments at a time is beyond him). And he says, so quietly Peeta wonders if he imagined it, "I'm glad to have you back, boy."

Peeta doesn't know how this man is connected to him, but he knows that he is, can feel it tugging at him deep and low. So he lets the corners of his mouth twitch up and pretends, for the man's sake, that he does not see his answering tears as he hurries away.

* * *

His next visitor he does not know. She is stern, aloof, impassive as she watches him, and she doesn't speak. Peeta stares at her through slitted eyes. The cot is cold, the room is colder, and the straps holding him down don't allow for blankets. Still, he knows that it is her colorless eyes and her colorless hair against a colorless background that is leeching all the warmth from him.

He's heard of powers like this (though he doesn't remember when or from whom; or maybe he does, in nightmare images of a man with hair and beard as white as snow in a cell with him, touching him with a finger while snowflakes web through his mind), people with hearts of ice and the corresponding gift. He waits for the feel of an icicle in his heart, for the frost to creep through his veins, for the breath to freeze in his lungs.

But death is never so easy to grab hold of.

Eventually, the woman gives a small sigh, almost wistful, and then leaves.

It's a long time and many drugged nightmares later before Peeta feels any warmer.

* * *

There's a boy at his side, and Peeta almost cries to see him. Not because he knows him, not because just the sight of him makes all his memories return (it doesn't), but because the boy has copper hair and green eyes and tanned skin, and the colors are so bright, so vivid, that Peeta shakes and shakes. (He's been afraid that whatever damaged his brain, whatever blocks and cauterizations are up there, permanently took away his ability to see color at all.)

"I hope you wake up enough to talk soon," the boy says. "That way I won't feel so awkward when I introduce myself."

Peeta watches and waits.

"Finnick," the boy finally says. "And Johanna might come by too, but don't let her take your morphling, okay? She already has enough crutches to get by."

His name is Peeta and his life has been short and filled to the brim with terrible things and he is important in a way that makes him feel very _un_important. All of that Peeta remembers. What he doesn't remember (besides the reason he feels like something has been torn out of him and is missing; besides the name of the lullaby swimming somewhere deep, deep inside him) is what he looks like. He is pale, he knows this, and too thin and bruised and hurt. But he doesn't know what color his own eyes are or if he breaks the endless white of this room as well as Finnick does. He doesn't know what his own expressions are. He only knows that they are good enough to convey thoughts without words when Finnick laughs and answers his mute question.

"Johanna and I don't know you, maybe, but we know who saved us. We know who you are, Peeta Mellark. A couple thank yous and a few gifted people owing you their lives can never go amiss, right?"

There's something sly in Finnick's eyes, a coyness that doesn't seem malevolent. Still, Peeta recoils at the mention of debts owed. He turns his face from the colors and squeezes his eyes shut.

Another mark in the pattern, another day in his endless prison(s): the drugs flow through his veins and he is drowned by the sea.

* * *

A girl does come, loud and sarcastic and biting. Peeta relaxes in her presence, lets her pinch at the needles at his arms (as if he could stop her even if he wanted to), listens to the loneliness seeping up behind her snark.

"Guess trying to help didn't really do you much good, did it?" she asks him without any expectation of an answer.

Peeta's lips curve up, and she stares at him, her mask slipping.

He doesn't mind her bite, her bark, her mood (he thinks that he once lived with someone as biting, as barking, as moody, but his mother had no hope underneath it, no kindness at all, just pain and cruelty and a lifetime of disappointment).

She laughs after a moment, and bumps his shoulder with her hand. "You're not as bad off as you want them to think you are," she comments, but softly, a secret just between them, shared like screams between walls.

Johanna never stays long and her visits can't be predicted, but she keeps coming back and Peeta's glad for it (it's nice, when he has no way to strike out himself, to be around someone who can do it for him).

* * *

There are others, one-time visitors who talk over him or to him or at him. Peeta snatches at words, at meanings, at coherence, but any time he feels he is making progress, the drugs slip through his veins and steal away all his thoughts.

"Not yet," the doctors say. "Your mind isn't strong enough yet."

They lie. Peeta spots the lies, can taste them in his own mouth underneath the sickly sweet aftertaste of poison, and wonders if he can lie too.

* * *

Then, one day (an arbitrary day in the midst of his repetitive patterns), they pull the needle from his arm and take the straps from his ankles, his knees, his waist, his chest. Not the ones from his wrists; those pull and chafe, a handy bit of pressure he can use whenever he wants to stay awake (stay sane).

"The Mockingjay," they say above his head, over and over again.

_The Mockingjay, the Mockingjay, the Mockingjay_, until he wonders if it's a song, an anthem to march with, a lullaby to sleep to, a dirge to die for.

He is tired, he is growing impatient, he tugs and pulls at the straps around his wrists until existing bruises welt and bleed, bright red against white cot, white walls, white floor, white skin. (Sometimes, he dreams that he made up all the colors, that the whole of the world is painted colorless and it is then his greatest nightmare that he must wake from dreams of sunsets to stare at featureless expanses.)

Then the door opens. It startles him (his other visitors are always already in the room when he wakes to them; he only ever sees people leave) and his hands tighten into fists (white as the cell around him).

A girl enters. Small, thin, slinking around the edges of the room as if she is afraid of him (him, who's tied and drugged and broken), not extraordinarily pretty. But something. Something. _Something _keens for this girl, tugs and pulls like a dog at the leash, straining.

(But to protect or to attack? To help or to hurt?)

"Peeta," she whispers. Her eyes are gray and clear. Her hair is dark and gleaming. Her skin is olive and dark. She's like a shadow in the room, a bit of rest from the brightness always attacking his eyes, like warmth and shelter in a blizzard storm. And her voice…her voice is the one that sings. That hums. That soothes and _matters_.

(_Stay with me_, he dreamed she said, and so he did, he has, he's here, still alive, still striving, still surviving.)

"Katniss," he croaks, and only knows it is her name when he hears himself say it (the first word he remembers ever uttering).

The girl (_Katniss_, his heart groans) stares and stares and stares. And then she does the last thing he expected: she cries. No, it is more than that. She crumples to the ground and sobs as if her heart is breaking, as if the entire world has come down on her and her last lifeline has been severed.

(She cries when he speaks, and he doesn't know how he knows her name or what this connection between them is, but he feels as if she is always doing things he doesn't expect. As if he is used to letting her down and making her cry. As if this is just one more in a long line of disappointments.)

"Peeta," she says, and instinctively, his hands jerk, as if to reach for her.

Clumsily, Katniss wipes at her face with her sleeves and stumbles to her feet, almost trips over herself as she crosses the room to reach him.

"Peeta," she says, soft and warm and achingly beautiful in a way he didn't recognize just a moment earlier.

And then the softness vanishes, enveloped in sudden savage ferocity, so overpowering that Peeta sweats and cowers.

"Why are you tied up?" she demands.

Peeta sags. It's not him, just the restraints around his wrists.

"I don't mind," he tries to say, but his voice must still not be working because she doesn't respond to his reassurance.

"What is this?" she snaps, and she's looking away from him, at the cot with the loose straps and the bindings on his hands and the walls around them. "You said you were keeping him safe! You said you were looking after him!"

Frowning, Peeta tries to decide if he has gone crazy or if she has. Who is she even talking to? And then there, in the reflection of her clear eyes, he sees it, what he thought was a wall behind him.

A window.

A reflection through which they watch him. Staring, observing, judging, analyzing, and a deep and weighty anger builds like an earthquake through his bones, low and sonorous and moving outward in tectonic upheaval.

(They lie and lie and lie, and Peeta may have forgotten so much, may have lost years and years, but this he knows above all: a lie can cut both ways.)

"He's a painter!" Katniss is yelling. "He likes the sunset! He knows the names of all the colors! You can't put him here! You can't leave him here! This is just like where we came from!"

_Where we came from_.

They were together. They were unified. Allies. Partners. Neighbors. Peeta's mind shakes under the flash of an image, four white walls and rust-red stains, screams from next door and his own voice (steady and sure, confident and purposeful, everything he no longer is) threading between the pain and the anguish to make something better (but never quite enough).

He's so lost to his flashback that the jerk of something at his hands terrifies him so much he yelps.

Katniss leaps away from him, hunched and small with her hands held up as if to show that she is harmless (but she isn't, something inside him whispers; she is the most dangerous thing of all). "I'm sorry," she says, so fast the words stumble and fall around them. "I'm sorry, don't be afraid. Please," her voice drops to a whisper, "please don't be afraid of me."

"I'm not," he says (a lie, deception, practice for the quakes of anger still rippling through the core of him and readying themselves to be loosed on the world in an upheaval of mayhem).

Tentatively, an inch at a time, she moves closer to him until she can reach out and start to free his wrists.

"It's okay," he tells her. "The pain grounds me."

Something sharp and tragic flashes across her face. "No," she says shortly. "Pain doesn't do that, Peeta. Not for you. We'll find something beautiful for you, okay? That's what grounds you. You like pretty things."

"Do I like you?" he asks (because he thinks he does, he doesn't think he wants to hurt her, doesn't think he _could_ hurt her, not on purpose).

(Though he thinks, somehow, that _she_ can hurt _him_, irrevocably and permanently.)

Her mouth trembles as her hands still for an instant. Then she bends her head so her hair hangs in her face, a silken shield, and finishes freeing his hands.

"You used to," she answers, and takes a step away.

"Katniss," he says, trying to ignore the window at his back (he thought the four walls were bad; only now does he think three walls and a window are worse). "Do I know you?"

She stares at him for a long moment. Then, when he thinks she will answer and he will finally have pieces to put together his puzzle, she turns and runs.

In a way, it answers his question. He's pretty sure watching her run away from him is the most familiar thing he's seen since he came back to himself.

* * *

In the middle of his night, half-trapped in paralyzing dreams, Peeta grows cold. He opens his eyes and is not surprised to see the colorless woman back, staring down at him.

"You would have been easier," she muses. "In some ways…"

She says nothing else.

In the morning, awake and sitting up for the first time on his own, he wonders if he dreamed it.

* * *

They move him to a room with gray walls and a bed with a brown blanket. The man who smells of liquor comes in, grumpy and dispirited.

"You just had to break her, didn't you?" he grumbles.

But he gives Peeta a sketchpad and five pencils, each one colored differently (red and orange and yellow and blue and green).

"What's your name?" Peeta asks. He chooses to study his pencils closely so as to miss the moment when the man stares at him (he is so very tired of all the stares).

"Haymitch," he says. "Guess if there's only room for you to remember one name, it would be hers."

"I remembered mine too." He's not sure why that's important, only feels that it is.

"Yeah, well…at least that's something."

Haymitch leaves.

Peeta stares at the blank white page, the first in the sketchbook. More than anything, he wants to cover that white with the colors Haymitch left him. Try as he might, though, he can't think of what to draw. (Does he even know _how_ to draw?)

When he falls into bed, mentally exhausted, the sketchbook is still empty.

* * *

Now that he's off the needles, they begin bringing him meals. Mostly tasteless soups and unidentifiable vegetables. The day there is meat on his tray, he sees in his fractured mind a bow made of flames.

Finally, the first page of his sketchbook has a picture in it. Crude and clumsy, but bright and recognizable. Peeta would think it was progress if he had any idea what it means.

* * *

Gradually, they begin letting him out of the room. Two guards are always with him (_for your protection_, they say, but Peeta's been practicing his own lies, too), no matter where he goes. The cafeteria where he sits alone, overshadowed by his escort. The hospital where they poke and prod and ask him countless questions but never answer any. The training room where the gifted children are fashioned and molded and turned into soldiers.

"Peeta, they finally let you out!" Finnick says when Peeta's shown to the room for the first time. The green-eyed boy has a tub sitting at his feet and a trident made of transparent water in his hands. A bit behind him, out of the way, a girl sits and watches him, water in her own eyes and madness dogging her steps and love in the tilt of her head as well as the curve of Finnick's hand when he caresses her hair.

Johanna looks over at his shout, her own earthen gift showing itself in constructed axes that fly through the air and sink soundlessly into far away targets.

"War," Peeta recognizes, the truth slipping from him before he can hold it back.

His mind is bruised and battered, his brain filled with holes, his own gift on a strange sort of hiatus. It doesn't matter. He doesn't need any powers to recognize what is happening here.

(It's the same thing that's happened before on the other side, and before that on their side, and before that on the other, a pattern with no end.)

"War," Johanna agrees with savage pleasure.

Finnick practices with his water, Johanna with her metals, more children behind them with all their disparate gifts, names swirling into powers (Beetee with electricity thrumming through his voice, Annie with her water and her madness, Enobaria and Brutus with unnatural strength, Cashmere and Gloss imbued with speed, even Haymitch, occasionally, with sputters of drunken smoke).

Peeta refuses to pick up a solid weapon.

(Every day, he practices his lies.

War, they said, and war it is, so he needs a weapon that will not fail him, the most powerful weapon he knows.)

* * *

There is a truth he tells himself, nestled deep inside him, a boulder which plugs up all the secrets he cannot remember. This truth is sharp, it is two-edged, it can as easily destroy him as restore him.

It is this: lies are his domain. Lies are his power. Lies can remake the world.

(And yet, even this truth is a lie.)

* * *

Katniss comes to him at night. She slips in while he sleeps, sits silently beside him while he stirs, whispers truths to him while he dreams. Her fingers play through his hair, a touch so soft he'd think it a dream if he didn't know that only nightmares come for them. If he wakes, she slips away like steam before the cold, soundless and invisible. Her presence is a secret, one he thinks he's not supposed to know, but he does. A secret just between them so he keeps it close and tucks it away somewhere safe, wraps it in the lie of sleepy paralysis.

"You lived in a bakery," she tells him, "with a father and two brothers and a mother who wasn't as kind as she should have been. You deserve kindness, Peeta."

(He remembers a kitchen with three ovens and dough thick between his fingers. He remembers three different shades of blond and a father who rarely spoke but always listened. He remembers, in nightmares, an open hand and a slap, a fist and a bruise, a voice and poisonous lies that became sickly truths.)

"You were always my friend," she tells him another night, "even before I knew it. You helped me, always, and protected me, but you always had to pay for it, sometimes in ways I still don't fully understand."

(He remembers a cell and his own voice weaving between screams. He remembers a bakery and an apple tree and a welt on his cheek. He remembers fire scorching through his leg and a little girl with golden hair on fire and Katniss in his arms screaming and fighting to go back into the inferno.)

"You help people," she says when the nightmares are so bad every one of his muscles are locked tight. "Sometimes by saying something kind, sometimes by doing something nice, sometimes just by noticing someone. Maybe that's why you notice beauty too, because you see it everywhere in people."

(He remembers a little girl, a red dress, a voice that charms the mockingjays. He remembers a girl starving and then not, self-sufficient and strong, feeding herself and her family while battling her uncontrollable gift. He remembers a girl broken and desolate, a victor nonetheless who still took the time to shield a young dark-skinned girl when the Peacekeepers came for them and dragged them to the white cells and left the little girl in a grave of flowers.)

"Your favorite color is orange," she reminds him, "like the sunset. I…I don't know why the sunset and not the sunrise, but you're very particular about it. You painted a picture once to show me the color, but you said it wasn't quite right. I thought it was the most beautiful painting I've ever seen. You're always doing that, making me see things I never noticed before."

(He remembers painting a girl deluged in rain and sparkling with life. He remembers a paintbrush in his hand when he first realized he could make someone see something better, could paint lies into reality, could make his mom think he was on the floor writhing when instead he was standing across the room. He remembers huddling in a cell and listening to screams fade away, opening his mouth and beginning to build a world as extravagant, as detailed, as life itself.)

"Peeta," she says, every night just before she leaves. It's the beginning of a plea, he can hear it in her tone, like the melody ready to follow the harmonious intro. But she never finishes. Never says anything more. Just his name trailing off into silence.

(He remembers fashioning a friend for her in that world made just for her, a friend from the Seam, a friend who could hunt, a friend who understood violence but could be ruled by passion. He remembers naming the friend _Gail_, and he remembers when Katniss's mind twisted and reformed the friend until it was _Gale_ there, tall and strong and undeniably male. He remembers, and he wonders if the plea she cannot bring herself to voice is to make that friend real once more, to bring back the sister and the friend and the world that was touched by the harshness that makes her strong, but not cowed by the tragedy that bowed her so temporarily.)

"Peeta," she says when she comes and when she goes, bookends to these wistful visits. Peeta always keeps his eyes closed, half-submerged by nightmares she alone recognizes, and lets her think that he sleeps.

She steals away as soundlessly as she comes, every night leaving behind more jigsaw pieces for him to sort through.

Gradually, slowly, he begins to put them together.

Gradually, day by day, his sketchbook begins to fill.

* * *

The doctors never tell him that he is healing. Their constant patter of words is filled with conditions and provisos, ifs and maybes and we'll sees, all of it underscored by the fact that they are making it all up as they go along. If any other gifted child has ever tried to do what he did, they did not survive. He is the first. The only. (It makes him feel strange, strong and weak, brave and foolish, all at once, but always, always like a lab animal, a mutt on which they practice their experimentations.)

Still, Peeta knows that he is getting better. He is not quite so cold now, warmed by the touch of a hand on his brow (warm but oh so careful not to be _too _warm; to comfort, never to harm). His limbs are steadier, shaking only immediately after he wakes to an empty room and a collection of drawings he doesn't fully understand. He is stronger, surer of his place and his plans, never leaning on his guards even after a full afternoon in the training room.

And, of course, the one sign that proves it above all (the sign that is a truth he carefully wraps and conceals and buries in defensive lies). The mark the doctors told him he might never see again, the proof they look for while cautioning him (and hoping, secretly, but their secrets are not hidden nearly as well as his) that it might never happen for him.

But it does. Oh, it does. And he is glad, because this is war and he must be useful and the Mockingjay is sinking beneath the weight of their expectations and she needs all the help she can get. He is glad…but he is also so very afraid.

Peeta lies. It's what he's done since he was a small child, so happy with the present his father gave him of a homemade paintbrush and berries for paint. Since the moment his mother found him with that brush and her temper snapped, her affection so brittle and shallow that anything could crush it to dust. Since she lashed out and Peeta…simply moved aside. Moved aside and let her think that he was there in front of her. He could feel her fury, her resentment, her envy, and so he gave all of those emotions an outlet in a ghost-boy that cowered before her.

He lied when the Peacekeepers came to District 12 with their stockades and their whips, when they left people out there for days and days. He huddled inside himself as meager protection against their white-masked righteous indignation and their learned brutality, while he let those emotions form the image of stockades filled and backs torn open (images he had to conjure, had to picture in every detail, that made him give up painting for a while lest all those terrible nightmares be given form on the limited canvases available to him).

He lied when District 13 fought back and 12 became a battleground and Katniss with her bow and her flaming arrows was at the forefront of it all, pinned there by a love (for Primrose, always for Primrose and her healing hands) so fierce it seared away the horror of his usual shared images. He shielded himself beneath her ferocity and her purity and he made her a target here, there, everywhere but where she actually was. He stood himself at her side and created a thousand lies to keep her alive.

Lies have only failed Peeta a handful of times before. Once, when Katniss was hurt despite all his best efforts and lay sedated and healing on a hospital bed. When the Capitol struck and District 13 retaliated and ignited flames that weren't controlled by anything but mechanics and hatred…and a young girl burned. The inferno was so hot, so destructive, that all his lies withered before the heat and there was only the stark truth that crushed the hollowed girl he carried, kicking and screaming, from the hospital as his leg burned away.

And once, when Katniss asked him why he protected her, why he stayed always there when his family was already gone and there was no reason left for him to fight. "You could run away," she said, "and make a new life for yourself far away. You could be safe. Why stay?"

He said something, then, some honest answer. Let the lies fall away and told her the singular truth that defined him.

(He remembers that he told the truth, remembers that he let down his guard and opened himself to her flames. But he cannot, either by accident or design, remember what that truth was.

And so, even with a name and returning memories, he does not know who he truly is.)

The truth is hard. It cuts and burns and devours. Whatever truth he revealed, whatever answer he wanted in response…even without remembering it, he wakes now from nightmares, trembling and mute and locked up like his voice once was. It destroyed him, he realizes, whatever reaction there was. It mutilated him and left him as desolate and broken as Katniss is without her sister. It hollowed him out and faded his lies, and when Snow came for them, he did not fight as desperately as he should have.

No, the truth…it is too much. The world (_he_) is not ready for it.

So even though his lies might be fallible, it is safer to choose them. And when the day comes that he stands near Finnick as the green-eyed boy looks at Annie, that he follows Finnick's gaze and sees a girl more beautiful than the ocean, more magnetic than the tides (sees flashes of a little girl mending nets; and a girl weeping and weeping when she and not her brother is pulled from the sea; and a girl who calms at his fishing hands and kisses him so sweetly), Peeta knows.

He is healing.

His gift is back.

And the games have truly begun.

(And he hopes with searing honesty that this won't be one of the times his lies will falter and fail.)

* * *

He heals, but slowly. His mind mends itself back together, but fractured. His gift returns, but not wholly. (His memories sift like snowflakes, cold and sharp but dissolving too quickly, leaving no big picture behind, just pinpricks of sensation.)

Haymitch comes to see him on the second day Peeta refuses to leave his room. Peeta knew someone would come, though he hoped for a bit more time to try to get a handle on this.

"I see you've been drawing," Haymitch says as he looks around the tiny room. It's not much, but it's better than the white walls and the window (Peeta's looked for tiny cameras but has found none; that doesn't mean they're not there).

Peeta clenches the pencil (red, and it's half the length it was when he got it, used up and bled over the papers falling from his sketchbook). "Yeah," he says. He's afraid to look up. Afraid to see Haymitch's eyes (to see his truths). "It helps."

"Huh." Haymitch is awkward, unsure, and it almost makes Peeta smile. He wonders why he's drawn to people like this (Haymitch and Katniss and Johanna, strays and ferals), who long for kindness but snap at it in the next breath. "Guess she was right."

And the emotions (_Haymitch's_) swell and crest and break over Peeta.

Suddenly, he's not in his room trying to focus on the half-drawn picture of a mockingjay with a flaming arrow in its chest. Instead, he's in District 12, in the Seam, and what he knows is his cot has seemingly become the side of a small, rundown house. There's a girl there with dark hair and gray eyes, achingly familiar, but the next instant, it is a boy Peeta has seen only as a too quickly aged drunk, sharp-tongued and sharp-eyed, sarcastic and cunning and broken, everything he doesn't want this so familiar girl to become. There's a girl with a bow on her back and smoke rising from her footprints and the desire to protect, the inclination to turn away and let things work out for themselves, the determination gradually superseding his thirst for numbness.

Peeta drops the pencil (or does he? he can't see the pencil, can't feel it anymore, hopes he is not ruining it) and curls the fingers of his right hand over his left wrist. Tightens and squeezes until his bones grate against each other.

The Seam disappears, replaced by his little room. Haymitch stands by the door, oblivious, awkward, no sign at all that he is preoccupied with worry for a girl he offered to help, a girl he trained in how to control her inner fire. No sign that he is happy to be here, reunited with the boy he never knew what to do with but was always glad to see.

Swallowing, Peeta bends and picks up the red pencil from where it has rolled under the bed.

"You okay?" Haymitch asks (Peeta is drowning under concern, worry, repressed affection, sees an image of himself through someone else's eyes, so much younger than he feels, so much brighter than he is).

"I'm tired," he says (it's a lie and it's a truth and the combination is the most potent of all).

"Sure, okay."

Peeta's eyes are squeezed tightly shut, but he doesn't need sight to know that Haymitch has caught sight of the picture he's been drawing.

The room vanishes again, replaced by a trap, a cage about to snap shut on Haymitch, no, on that gray-eyed girl Haymitch loves with a fierceness he will never admit. The sketchbook is on fire, a blinding target, a sign of everything that is wrong. And Peeta himself, he is a ravening mutt, docile until triggered and then ready to strike and snap and kill.

"I'm tired," he says again, or thinks he does, but can only hear the mutt snarling with a savagery that alarms him (no, it alarms _Haymitch_, but the lines between their minds are blurred right now). He closes his burning, blinding sketchbook and the room reforms around him.

"Kid," Haymitch says slowly, "you… How much do you remember now?"

"Enough," he says shortly. (No use in saying more when eyes could be staring from any hidden window. No use in trying to explain when Haymitch has already chosen, over and over again, who he will protect. No use in explaining what his shattered mind can scarcely make sense of.)

Haymitch leaves, the stench of alcohol lingering long after he's gone.

Peeta stares at his sketchbook and tries to believe that he can control this.

* * *

There is the lie he tells himself when he is alone, over and over and over until the repetition engraves it on every one of his cells. It is the lie he is putting all his hopes into, the deception that is his strategy, his goal, and his weapon all in one.

This is the lie: that he is important. That he can succeed. That he will not be left behind, locked in featureless white and stripped of his mind again.

(It is a lie, it is a truth, but they do not blend and merge into a new reality, only rub each other raw, wholly separate, like water and oil, and oh so very flammable.)

* * *

Eventually, he has to leave his room. If he wants the doctors and the observers and the woman of ice (Coin, he hears whispered among the soldiers) to think his gift has been melted out of him, leeched away and blocked off, then he cannot give up the game by sequestering himself from people.

After all, he's Peeta Mellark. The Empath. The Voice. The Protector. Everything he is depends on him being surrounded by people, seeking them out and knowing them and connecting to them.

So he goes to the training room where the vast space with its mats and nets and obstacle courses become, alternatively, an ocean where Finnick ties nets and makes nooses, a seashore where Annie hums and collects seashells, a forest where Johanna fells trees and enemies alike, a battleground upon which they're arrayed like chess-pieces and lives become merely puzzles for Beetee to solve.

Peeta sits in the corner and tries to pretend that he is blind, tries to remember the lines that demarcate his identity from the others, the delineation between _him_ and everything else. He's been quieter, since waking here, so the others don't seem to notice that he keeps silent as often as possible. They still try to include him, still laugh with him, but Peeta wonders if all he's ever been to them is a pretty lie, because they never seem to realize that he is quietly going mad.

The walls are seldom there (no one likes to see them; everyone pretends them away; so Peeta cannot see them either). The corridors are eternal, never-ending (particularly when Johanna is around, who hates the maze with a passion and imagines woods and shacks and a place were no one can find her but where she will not feel alone). The cafeteria is sometimes friendly and safe and transformed into a bakery or a restaurant or a simple home kitchen; but other times it is a vast and echoing place where he's too intimidated to step forward. The tables vanish or are all full or are too empty, the food is tasteless or disgusting or not there at all, the company is abrasive or sustaining, too much or not enough.

Peeta moves slowly, sits where his guards do, clutches his hands over where there should be a fork, lifts food to his mouth and tries not to process the tastes everyone around him imagines.

Occasionally, Annie will walk at his side, and sit beside him, and nudge the spoon to his grasping fingers. She never says anything, never lets on that she notices; he doesn't think she does. It takes him a while, but one day, he finally recognizes why she seems familiar, why the seashore she imagines with its endless shells and comforting murmur of waves and the nets that Finnick wove for her is a view Peeta doesn't mind.

They were prisoners, all these gifted (cursed, the Capitol calls them, outlawed and illegal, hunted and slaughtered and locked away to be used), and Peeta was no different. Placed in a cell and left to his own devices when they weren't interested in torturing him for information he didn't have or for reactions he couldn't give. On one side of him, there was a girl who keened and cried and screamed, who didn't know how to live with the hole inside her, who was so beautiful, so pure, so _worthy_ that he created a whole world for her.

On his other side, there was a girl who rocked in silence and covered her ears and muttered denials.

For a while, before the world he made for a dead girl and a living sister became so complex it demanded all of his attention, before his mind began to buckle under the pressure, he would whisper this same seashore (Annie's seashore) into existence.

As soon as he catches hold of that memory, he is granted more. Finnick laughs his easy laugh (adjusts his abstract armor) and Peeta sees the infirmary turn into a fishing boat he remembers trying to design by imagination alone. When Johanna dreams of sharp blades and poisoned threats, Peeta thinks it looks familiar and wonders how long he tried to help her (not that he could, not that he helped anyone, crushed under the weight of his hubris in trying to make a new, better reality where there were no gifts, no curses, just simple survival).

It doesn't matter what he did, what he tried to do, how many minds and emotions he played with. All that matters is that they are suffocating him, closing him in a prison made of mist and smoke and mirrors. Whatever they (everyone else, anyone else) see is more real than the concrete walls and floor, than the doors he walks into because the guards are already envisioning past them, than the people he crashes into because Johanna ignored them, than the sketchbook he can only draw in (only _see_) when no one else is around and his mind (what's left of it) is almost his own.

"Who am I?" he asks while huddled in his bed, afraid to sleep, afraid to wake up. "Who am I?"

And when his eyes slide closed and his breaths slow, Katniss materializes at his side to tell him.

* * *

"You told me not to be a piece in their games," she says while he breathes deeply and resists the urge to open his eyes (easier, maybe, to keep them closed so he does not see whatever mirage _she_ makes of his surroundings). "It's the first thing you ever said to me, actually, when I started fighting back and District 13 offered to protect…protect Prim…if I did what they said. You told me that you didn't want to lose yourself and I shouldn't either."

It's silent for five, ten, fifteen heartbeats, so long he wonders if she has slipped away early tonight. But then there is the wisp of movement, a presence at his side, a warm touch at his brow, and the scent of pine and smoke and _life_.

"You also told me that there were things worth fighting for. You told me I could survive. You told me…you told me lots of things. So many things. But not enough. You need to stay so you can keep saying things, Peeta."

And he is, abruptly, tired of this lie.

"You make it sound like I talk a lot," he says.

Katniss is halfway across the room by the time he sits up, her fingers scrabbling for the door, her hair shielding whatever naked emotion is there in her gray eyes. Not that it matters. He can feel her panic blazing through the room like flames, her yearning to be free (and for something else he can't quite catch) like smoke in his lungs, her skittishness like hot coals under his feet.

"Wait, please!" he calls out.

The door clicks open…and Katniss waits.

"Please," he says softly. "Don't go. Stay."

Her hand remains on the doorknob, but her body shifts, just an inch, toward him.

"I…I just want to talk. Is it…is it okay if I ask you a few questions?" When her body tenses as if to flee, he adds, almost helplessly, "I just want to know what's real and what's not."

Another long pause during which he holds his breath and counts his fluttering heartbeats.

Then the door clicks closed. Katniss's hand falls to her side. And she turns to face him (still downcast, still hiding behind her loose hair, but _staying_).

"Thank you," he breathes.

"Yeah, well, I may not have the answers," she says, so shortly, so brusquely, that he is surprised into a laugh.

"Okay. That's… I don't have the answers either so at least we'll be even."

Her breath catches in her throat, her hands fluttering at her sides.

He tilts his head (as if a different angle will make the truth of her clean lines and open face, so stark and clear that it disorients him, come into focus). "What? What's wrong?"

"Nothing." She shakes her head. Inches a tiny step nearer him. "You laughed. And…and I don't think we'll ever be even."

"I owe you?"

She stares (different than the stares of everyone else, hers awed and disbelieving). "No," she chokes out. "Why would you think that?"

"Well, you saved me, didn't you? They say you burned down my prison and carried me to freedom. They say I owe you my life."

"They don't know what they're talking about," she snarls, all bristling hackles and bared teeth (and this is when Peeta begins to understand that she is not a mockingjay but a lioness, wild and untamed and protective of the strangest things). "You saved my life a long time ago, and a thousand times after that."

"Maybe we don't have to owe anything," he offers (quietly, gently, no sudden movements, just soothing voice and soft tones so that he might catch a glimpse of the wild creature before it slinks back to its roaming hunts). "I mean, I don't even remember a lot and you _did_ save me, so…can't we just start over?"

"What?"

"Well, if I stop acting like I'm sleeping every night and you stay to actually talk to me, maybe instead of tallying up debts, we could just be friends."

"Friends," she repeats (the lioness transformed back into the mockingjay, parroting back the words and tones of others). "You…you want us to be friends?"

"You said we were friends." He tries not to hold his breath as he waits for her answer (afraid this is another truth like the one he can't quite remember; afraid her reaction will break him again). "Have I really changed that much?"

"No." There's a crack in her voice, and Peeta is suddenly overwhelmed with the image of rain, so real he flinches from the cold wet of it, with two loaves of bread in his hands, hot and burned and smelling vaguely of walnuts. He sees a dandelion growing at his feet, shining as if in a spotlight, but shadowed by a bruise.

(Peeta's grown used to navigating this world by the lies other people show themselves; he has seen his own face in a hundred different ways: a young boy with danger like quicksand in his steps in his guards'; a full table and a glimpse of family in Johanna's; a friend, an equal, a curiosity in Finnick's, a safe harbor in Annie's; a paragon and a little boy and a chess-master all swirled together in Haymitch's. But he does not think any of those images of himself have confused him so much as this, the rain and the bread and the weed.)

"You haven't changed," she says. She's young and small and starving (says her own mind). She's strong and brave and undaunted (says the minds of all those who call her _Mockingjay_). She's a girl, a girl who fights battles for others and takes the time to protect those less fortunate and sneaks in at the dead of night to try to remind him who he is (says _him_).

"So…friends?" he asks with his heart in his throat (because this seems like so much more than a ghostly presence at night; because this doesn't seem nearly enough to fill the void like a black hole in the pit of his stomach).

"Okay, friends," she agrees. Reluctantly. Warily.

But when he makes room for her on his bed, she perches beside him. When he closes his eyes against the smell of cinnamon and dill and the brightness of the dandelion, her hand brushes, quick and fleeting, over his brow. And when he says, "So my favorite color is the orange of sunset, but what's yours?" she smiles and says, "Green."

And Peeta knows that his green pencil will soon be as short and well-used as his red.

* * *

His guards stop him when he makes to turn toward the cafeteria.

"Coin wants to see you," the one on the left says.

Peeta thinks about lying, just making them think he is walking between them while he actually turns and goes to eat his tasteless lunch (he's done it before, let the guards escort his ghostly form along his routine while he sneaks away to privacy and his sketchbook), but in the end he acquiesces. Better to know what Coin expects of him (to know what form to fashion his lies in) than to be surprised later.

The room they lead him to is large, predominantly filled with a table surrounded by chairs. It's a room designed to make the occupants think they have a say in what happens, but there is only one chair at the head, only one chair currently filled, and Peeta can spot truths as well as he can lies.

"Peeta," the woman with colorless eyes says (his veins fill with ice), "thank you for joining us."

And only then, in the presence of heat to combat Coin's frost, does Peeta realize that Katniss is there too.

Her eyes narrow when she sees him, but she turns back to Coin immediately (as if he doesn't exist while awake, as if he is not important enough to be included outside his room and their joint nightmares). "What's going on?" Katniss demands. "Where's Haymitch?"

"Probably drunk," Coin says. "Sit, please."

Peeta sits (a lie is swallowed so much more easily when accompanied by politeness and seeming obedience). Katniss (so honest, so true to herself, so pure) does not.

"I'm glad to hear that you're doing so much better, Peeta," Coin says. "Many of the gifted have expressed concern for you since realizing just how badly you were hurt."

"Thank you," Peeta says calmly, and feels the heat of Katniss's glower.

"In ideal circumstances, we would allow you time to recover at your own pace." Coin cocks her head, her hair a smooth sheet that moves with her. "However, these are not ideal circumstances. Since you and Katniss are obviously acquainted with each other once more, I believe it's time for us to push for an end to this war."

"What do you mean?" Katniss demands. "He's not better. He still hasn't remembered everything."

Peeta keeps his face bland, paints his expression with a lie, hides the truth (the wound) away so they cannot pounce while he is vulnerable.

"You've been visiting him every night you're here," Coin says bluntly, startling Katniss to silence.

"How do you intend to end the war?" Peeta asks, directing attention back to himself, away from Katniss. "From what I've heard, District 2 and the Capitol aren't folding."

"They only lack sufficient motivation. Motivation you and Katniss will provide."

"I've already been giving speeches and visiting hospitals." There's a dark current of bitterness soaking through Katniss's tone, seeded through with Coin's frost. "Since you won't let me go to kill Snow, what more is there?"

"You are the Mockingjay, Katniss, and the people listen to you. But we need something more than words now—we need an image that will resonate with the people and force them to action. And there's no image more powerful than that of the two of you together."

"What?" Peeta asks at the same time as Katniss, their voices combined in a duet of confusion.

"Katniss, when you first took up the cause, you wielded a bow and shot down Capitol hovercrafts with flaming arrows. But the shot everyone remembers, the sight they grew used to seeing before Snow captured you both, was that of Peeta throwing himself in front of you when the Peacekeepers fired on you. You're the Mockingjay, but he's your Protector. Together, you are the face of the rebellion. Together, you can rouse District 2 and even the Capitol to rise up and overthrow Snow."

It has the ring of a rehearsed speech (Coin is not as skilled a liar as she thinks, too blunt, too cold, to successfully connect with people and know what they really want). It has the snap of a trap being closed (a trap for Katniss, not him; he doesn't even need to see the table melt into the image of a Mockingjay collared and tamed and cowed, then shot through with an arrow and swept away as forgotten ashes, to know that).

"You want to put Peeta back out there?" Katniss is asking when Peeta blinks away the bright mirage and wakes back to hazy reality. "That's crazy. The doctors keep saying he's not strong enough—his gift hasn't even come back. It's too—"

"He doesn't need a gift to protect you." Coin stands, ready to dismiss them. "Besides, it's not as if he'll really have a weapon. You'll be surrounded by District 13 soldiers. All you need to do is stand together, look united, and let us do the rest."

"Why isn't Haymitch here?" Katniss asks again. "What did he have to say about throwing Peeta—"

The room chills so that frost covers the table. Peeta stares as his breath fogs the air in front of him. Is this real? Is this only what Coin imagines (is he giving himself away by hunching in on himself in uncontrollable shivers?) or is this actually happening (is Coin really so firmly setting herself against Katniss?)?

"We had a deal, Mockingjay," Coin says, snow pouring from her mouth. "We've held up our end—Peeta is well and recovering and safe. Now it's time for you to pay up on your end. Or would you rather we call off the deal entirely?"

Shivers wrack his spine (foreboding, not temperature) and Peeta wonders if he's strong enough to fashion a lie strong enough to get him out of here, away from the gray eyes so full of fury and the colorless eyes so full of greed. He wants to be back in his room, with its brown and its gray and its five colored pencils, his sketchbook filled with images not birthed from his own mind. He wants to be free, unshackled, _well_ again.

(But wishes have never helped him before. All the lies in the world won't make them start coming true now.)

"Fine!" Katniss snaps. "But if anything happens—"

"Bring me Snow," Coin says, her face impassive, her eyes aloof (her mind so full of bloodlust, of greed, of plots and plans and schemes, that Peeta thinks he will be caught there forever, trapped with no way to find his escape).

Katniss narrows her eyes, all lioness and teeth and savagery Peeta can't help but flinch away from. "If I don't kill him first," she says in tacit agreement.

"Good." Coin nods toward the door. "We'll let you know when you're to head out for the first propo. Remember, you're together. Unified. Strong."

"We know how to play the parts," Katniss snaps. "It's not like it's our first time."

A shockwave resonates through Peeta's cells, the _click_ of a puzzle piece snicking into place.

He protected her, he lied for her, he threw himself in front of her. He did it all willingly (he remembers his determination, his resolve, his suicidal desperation). But she…she didn't know why he was there. She didn't want him there.

(No wonder she created Gale from the lies he gave her.)

"Katniss," Peeta tries to say when they're in the hallway, but she's already backing away (fleeing, running, and why shouldn't she, when he has always been something foisted off on her?).

(No wonder she was so reluctant to accept his offer of friendship.)

"I have to find Haymitch," she says, impatient, uncomfortable. "He'll fix this."

Then she's gone.

Peeta lets his guards escort him back to his room (his cell) and wonders if Haymitch, when he comes to 'fix this,' will bring a key to lock him in (and never let him out again).

* * *

This is his lie: he matters. He is important. He is wanted.

This is his truth: he is a weapon. He is a prop. He is a tool.

They do not mix. They do not intermingle.

They are clear. Separate. Inviolable.

He is a piece in their games, a pawn to be traded off, a diversion to draw their eyes.

He isn't the Mockingjay. His lies are not songs. He is, in the end, _always_, expendable.

(His life is the lie; his death the truth they seek.)


	4. Chapter 4

Katniss takes his hand.

The train they've commandeered is rattling, a thrum in his bones, but not loudly enough to cover the sound of a crowd enraged and embattled ahead of them. The District 13 soldiers encircle them, heavily armed and packed so full of resolution that Peeta has seen his surroundings turned into the image of a battlefield so often he has stopped even trying to avoid the Peacekeeper corpses that lie underfoot like grisly fog.

Though she remains back in District 13, Coin's presence hangs in the air, ominous and as pervasive as the coming of winter.

There are currents that Peeta doesn't understand, maneuvering he wasn't privy to, and whatever Katniss thought Haymitch could do to 'fix this' wasn't enough.

So. Here they are. Free from the tunnels and corridors and endless gray, sent forth like sacrificial lambs to the beat of war and the drum of necessity, their shackles like invisible contracts sealing them into the parts they must play.

Another lie.

(And lies, he tells himself over and over again, are what he is good at and for.)

(He wonders, in the dead of night when he can't sleep, if that is just another lie.)

Just a lie when he sits there as if calm, the only giveaway his eyes drawn toward the window and the sky, so blue it makes his breath rattle in his chest, so free it could almost deceive him into thinking there isn't a station full of people waiting to see him and the Pyro Mockingjay.

Just a lie when he stands and moves, as if voluntarily, to the door, as if he is not terrified to greet the masses of people with their roiling emotions and overwhelming expectations.

Just a lie when he offers his hand and says, "For the audience?"

Fleetingly, he hopes that Katniss's reaction will show him something different, something revealing, some nugget of insight that will finally click in the last jumbled pieces of his (their) past. Instead, it is only, as always, the bread and the rain, the dandelion and, strangely, a pearl.

(Nothing he understands.)

She takes his hand, weaves her fingers between his (truth and lies mingling, interwoven, stronger when merged than alone), and the entire world sways around Peeta. The essence of Katniss washes over him. Longing and confusion and terror and awe and something so much bigger, so much deeper, so much _more_ than he can interpret.

In a bid for calm, he focuses on the _real_, the concrete, the physical.

Katniss's hand, so small, so thin. The fingers that end in calluses where blisters once were and fingernails that are, upon close inspection, just a little blackened. The tremors that ghost through her hand, fine and repetitive so that he sees, in his mind's damaged eye, a white floor and a hand skittering frenetically against it.

She's warm, so warm that he wonders if she carries a sun within her. (It's nice, after the cold of Coin's constant invasive presence, to feel himself thawing in Katniss's orbit.)

"Peeta," Katniss says, as if she means to tell him something.

The doors open, and whatever she has to say is swept away in the surge of the crowd outside.

District 2.

Mountains and fresh air and a breeze that tosses his styled curls and trees in the distance and clouds of stunning purple and yellow and silver. A feast for his eyes and a balm to his spirit, and all of it overpowered and obliterated by the sheer shock of the mass of people and emotions and thoughts and hopes and fears sweeping toward him, enveloping him, swallowing him up until the little he has managed to reclaim of himself is swept away, disintegrating into a million pieces, _Peeta_ a fast vanishing concept, all that's left behind a hollow shell soon to be filled with and then shattered by the storm of _other_.

"Peeta," Katniss is whispering, a single thread beneath the thousand tapestries assaulting him. A tiny silvery pearl hidden amongst the sand of a hundred seashores.

Her hand tightens over his. _Real_. Her hair smells of pine and flame. _Real_. Her mind is a steadily burning coal, heated and illuminated and grounded. _Real_.

"Peeta," she says again, and he is standing in a bakery, there is dough beneath his hands and warmth at his back and his dad is standing at the door talking intentionally loudly so Peeta can hear him announce Katniss's presence.

_Not real._

(But once, maybe, it was.)

Peeta grips Katniss's hand so tightly he's sure it hurts her, though she gives no indication of it. Instead, she lifts their arms in the air, a picture of unity that draws a cheer from the crowd. Peeta fixes his eyes on Katniss to avoid being overtaken by the chaos of so many conflicting minds again, traces the shape of her brow and the fall of her braid and the softness of her eyes when she looks at him.

And unbidden, from deep within his own mind (unsullied by the contamination of anyone else's thoughts), Peeta has the sudden desire to touch her. To stroke a finger along the curve of her cheek, to cup the back of her neck in his palm, and…and…

Purposely, Peeta lets the hurricane of emotions rock him, threaten his tenuous control (drive away the image of their lips mingling and weaving together as easily as their hands).

Katniss forces a smile (for the audience). Peeta follows her lead toward the hospital (for the audience). The crowd responds to them and shouts their renewed determination (for the audience still awaiting them in the Capitol).

* * *

The train moves from one place in the District to another; each time it stops, Peeta stretches out his hand and Katniss takes it. The doors slide open (funny, when it feels like they're always slamming shut in his face) and the crowds are there. Sometimes, they are jubilant; sometimes furious; more often than not, they're wary. It is never easy, he would think, to face an invading force, no matter how good their intentions supposedly are.

Katniss chafes at their pace, at their distance from Snow (at their ruse of togetherness). Peeta struggles to hold onto the jigsaw pieces of himself against the repeated onslaught of _other_ (does his best to shore up the lie of his ungifted state).

Occasionally, Katniss will slant him a look out of the corner of her eyes, such that he's almost sure she knows the truth he disguises (but which truth: the gift still rousing and stretching, or the kiss he envisioned that first day of their tour, the kiss that came to him in his dreams later that night, the memory of a kiss before District 13's arriving cameras, back when he was just becoming her Protector?).

He would take those slanted looks over the looks she begins sending him after Haymitch calls and asks to speak to her alone. Peeta doesn't need to have been in the room to know what she and her mentor talked about. It's clear in the way Katniss tenses when Peeta nears her, the way she won't turn her back on him even when he gets up to refill her hot chocolate, the way her mind is suddenly full of an image, a picture sketched in colored pencil—a mockingjay pierced by a flaming arrow.

Haymitch couldn't fix things for Katniss, but it appears he can ruin things for Peeta.

"I thought we were friends," Peeta says when she hesitates to take his hand at their next stop. He tries to sound conversational, nice, _friendly,_ but the hurt bleeds through (hurt always does, in some way or another).

"We are," she tells the buttons of his black uniform, refusing to meet his eyes.

She didn't hesitate in saying it, though, so Peeta tells her a truth.

"I won't hurt you."

Her eyes are so very gray. He always forgets just how clear they are, how direct, how striking, until she looks at him and he is surprised all over again. He doesn't know how he ever thought, even for a moment, that she wasn't beautiful.

"And I'll protect you," she says (a promise for a promise because nothing is free in Katniss's world).

"I thought we protected each other." It's a hint, maybe too big of one, but he's so tired of being so alone.

"We do." Katniss takes his hand, still held out between them, then slides her other hand over his elbow, presses closer than she has before (or has she? there's a memory lingering in her mind of the bakery and a cup of hot tea and a cake decorated like winter; but that's impossible because he's as sure as he can be with fragmented memories that Katniss never stepped foot into the bakery, and she certainly didn't wrap her arms around him while they sank toward the floor in an interwoven tangle).

"Together?" she asks.

"Together," he says, and the outside world swallows them yet again.

* * *

That night, when they return to the train where the District 13 soldiers protect (guard) them, Katniss screams. She always does, when sleep strips away all her flimsy shields and reality haunts her in the absence of a golden-haired healer.

Peeta hesitates outside her door, as he always does while he roams the train, trying to find some form of solace in everything _real_ he sees.

_Together_, she said, and_ together_ he agreed, so he opens the door and goes in.

Katniss screams and screams…until her eyes open. Until her hands latch onto his shoulders. Until his arms find their way (slowly, then all at once, like a stranger become family) around her. Until she nuzzles her nose just under his chin and asks him to stay with her.

"Always," he whispers to the cadence of her drowsy breaths.

Her fingers tighten against the edge of his jaw, her breath is warm and moist on his neck, her weight makes him real in a way completely new (foreign and familiar all at once).

Peeta trembles. But he sleeps.

And so does Katniss.

(Truth or lie? Lie or truth? This is something in between, a shade of gray as heated as the blue at the heart of a flame, as potent as the smell of forest and fire and burned bread, as potentially explosive as the gifts of a pyro.)

* * *

Eventually, District 2 falls. Whether Coin is pleased or not, she wastes no time in sending them their new orders.

To the Capitol.

Peeta hears the words, feels cold dread line his every muscle, and knows that finally it is time for him to protect Katniss (the Mockingjay, yes, but to him, the girl who snuck into his room to give him pieces of himself back). So far, the soldiers that constantly surround (police) them have given him little enough to do besides pose and playact (and wrap himself around Katniss in the dark to feel himself grow more real, more substantial, each night, shielded and protected from the constant _other_ bombarding him). Soon, though, he will be the only one who can protect Katniss as completely as she needs.

In stark contrast to his quiet resolve, Katniss is intent, the focus of a bow drawn taut and ready to sing with released tension, lacking only a perfect target.

"Why do you want to kill Snow so much?" he asks her one night, after screams have visited them, before sleep has enshrouded them.

She is silent for a very long time before she turns in his arms to face him. Her finger traces the line of his mouth, his cheeks, his brow, so ephemeral it feels like the wash of a sunbeam playing over his face. "Prim," she keens in answer—

* * *

There was a room, white as snow, cold as coins, enclosed and reeking of pain. There was another room, adjoining and tantalizingly close, torturously far. There was a girl who cried and screamed and keened, and he was suffused in helplessness and guilt. He wanted to help but couldn't. He should have saved her but hadn't.

Wisps of other dreams, other lies, touched his mind, and he tried to indulge them, to strengthen and nourish them all, but they eventually faded next to the sheer immediacy of the keening girl's need (of _his_ need to do something, _anything_, for her).

"Prim, Prim, Prim," she crooned endlessly, a tune played on broken heartstrings.

Peeta couldn't sing. He's no mockingjay. He's the canary, instead, the yellow bird who goes ahead and lets his death serve as a warning for those behind, the sacrifice that saves lives, the martyr who serves a purpose and then is left behind.

(There was a secret, and there was an answer, and there was a wound ripped into his heart. There was an attack and he wasn't there to save her, too busy licking his wounds, and she fell. There was a hospital and a fire and when he saw it, he ran straight into the inferno because he should have been there with her, for her, by her side. There was a little duck who became a restless ghost and there was a survivor who became a shell and there was a baker who became a protector who became a reject who became a torch who became a prisoner who became a storyteller who became a void who became…who is becoming…who_ is_.)

No mockingjay, not even a proper canary, so instead of singing, he began to tell a story.

And the white walls became District 12 (a better District 12, but not perfect because she would never believe anything less than _hard_), the cells became woods and Seam and Town, the air became breeze and snow, his voice became whatever (whoever) she needed it to be. Prim and her mother and her friend in the woods and the people in the Hob and a baker who traded.

And sometimes, Peeta himself.

* * *

"Prim," she keens in the dark train. "Snow killed her, you know. He deserves to die."

"Probably," he says, and then he tells her the darkest truth he knows: "But I don't think Snow killed your sister."

* * *

There was a District who went to war when a President began rounding up the children he named cursed and sending them to die in his arenas. There was a sister who couldn't let her Primrose die and a drunk who couldn't let this reminder of who he once was pass him by. There was a rebellion that ignited the entire country into a slowly simmering powder-keg. There was another President who saw her chance and made her move and joined the fight.

There was a girl and a boy who inspired the hearts of many. There was a moment when neither were as strong as usual, ripped apart and transformed from strong and wrathful creatures to scared and small children. There was a hospital where a president sought to make a martyr and a little girl died as collateral damage.

There was a war that faltered on the brink of failure until the girl on fire burned her way back into freedom.

There is a president who wants her dead and a president who wants her caged and a liar who wants only to keep her safe.

It's not the best story he's ever told. It may not even have a happy ending.

But it's the truth, and it feels so good, here in the dark and in the cradle of her arms, to finally stop lying.

* * *

They burn through the Capitol together, Katniss with her flames and Peeta with the gift that tweaks the audiences they encounter (soldiers or civilians, families huddling in hiding or mobs intent on acting) in their favor.

Finnick joins them, and Johanna, then Brutus and Enobaria, Gloss and Cashmere, Chaff and Seeder and Blight and Cecilia and more whose names Peeta never learns apart from the flashes of insights into their seared minds. An army of gifted (cursed and haunted and tormented, but inspired and uplifted and directed).

Traps are set, snares are triggered, ambushes fall on them from all sides, and day by day, the army is thinned down, children slaughtered and their bodies left where they fell. Cecilia is the first to go, then Blight, Seeder, Gloss and Cashmere in one fell swoop, Chaff standing alone, others throwing themselves in front of the helpless, exchanging one life for another.

Peeta lies and lies: false targets and evasions and misdirections, last lingering dreams in the minds of the dying to ease them gently from this life when there's no other hope, quiet moments with Katniss when his fingers _burn_ with the impulse to touch her, to caress and explore and tantalize, and he has to tell her stories to make her sleep so he can slip from the room and walk and walk and walk until he is safe to be around her again. (_Friends_, he promised her, and _protection_ he vowed to her, and neither of those allow him to force himself on her anymore than he already has.)

Step by bloody step, they slog their way toward the center of the Capitol, toward Snow and the head of the snake (and behind them, dogging their steps, a long shadow that keeps them chilled, the knowledge of another enemy just waiting to strike).

Then, one cold morning, monsters surge up from the sewer waters and pour into the streets. There are drops gleaming in the air and Finnick shimmering with the water he forms into a trident. But these are mutts, formed of the twisted gifts Snow stole from the children he rounded up and experimented on. Finnick fights, brave and heroic and everything a good story is made of—but one of the mutts does the impossible, and steals his trident made of sea water, splashes it against the rocks until there is nothing left but tiny liquid drops. The sunlight is harsh and glistening against exposed fangs, there is a scaled arm around his neck, and Finnick falls.

"Katniss," he says, her name his final death-knell.

Katniss goes silent. Cold. Still. No more songs. No more screams. No more memories given over to Peeta to help him rebuild. (No more nights wrapped in each other's arms.)

(He thinks she has given herself up to death. But not until Snow joins her.)

The white streets are charred with ash, the air filled with soot, the sky colored red with fire. Katniss is a dark silhouette, the pupil in the eye of a fiery storm.

Swept up in her wake, they arrive at Snow's mansion in moments.

And find a barricade of children.

* * *

Later, much later, Peeta will remember every second of that day. At the time, though, it is only a shifting collection of hazy blurs and sharp flashes. He would trade away the childhood memories he's reclaimed if only he could forget the sight of children torn to pieces and explosions Katniss couldn't control in time and the sound of the walls of the mansion and the neighboring buildings coming down in earthquakes that rip through the ground and leave hungry chasms behind.

What's sharp, what's clear, what he cannot escape, is Katniss. Unbowed. Undaunted. Unafraid. (Resigned to her fate. Ready to die. Resolved to take a life with her as she goes.)

It scares him, how close he was to losing her. How perilously near she was to throwing herself across a chasm to attack Snow, who stood on a balcony to overlook the destruction at his doorstep. Peeta was three steps behind Katniss (three lifetimes too far away), and it wasn't close enough. If Katniss had leaped, if she had scrabbled over that gulf and left him behind…she would have died. She would have taken Snow with her, yes, he does not doubt that, but she would have given her own life in exchange.

And Peeta would have had to watch it all happen (and will see it, he knows, every night, every time he closes his eyes).

One moment more and his whole world would have been lost. The nights with her breath against his neck and her hand curled over his heart and her thumping heart slowing in response to his whispers. The pieces of his past she holds within her and the answer to whatever truth he confessed to her (that he thinks he is beginning to guess, to understand, to _feel_) and the little bits of the future he has been able to imagine in her presence. The way she protects him and the way she looks at him and the way she says his name.

One moment more and he would have had to lay his own life down, too, throw himself at that chasm and not care in the least if he made it across to the other side.

But this is a chess game, and there are two kings (presidents) vying for control of the pawns.

In the instant that Katniss tenses in preparation of her leap, a hovercraft appears in the sky, emblazoned with the symbol of District 13.

Snow looks down at the chess board from a balcony and Coin observes the play from a hovercraft, both of them holding themselves above the actual fray.

More District 13 soldiers pour into the rubble, surround the mansion and the remains of children and a king in check.

(But not checkmate.)

Peeta takes the three steps to Katniss's side, wraps his hand around hers, and chooses his own battleground (pawn or knight, he protects his queen, the most powerful piece there is). If she falls, he will fall with her.

But he doesn't think that's how this story ends.

He's already seen the end, after all. In Coin's mind, blazing and etched in ice—a mockingjay pierced by a flaming arrow. A trap set and sprung and laid at the feet of the enemy.

Katniss hums with throbbing urgency as Snow is seized and brought down to the ground to stand before the crowds converging on them from all sides. Peeta is quiet so that he may appear harmless, a prop balanced next to the Mockingjay to make the board more evenly balanced, as Coin's hovercraft lands and she strides onto Capitol ground to face her opponent.

Snow looks at only Katniss. Katniss sees only Snow. Coin envisions only her victory, the reward for all her patience.

Peeta sees everything.

* * *

A Capitol beautiful and preserved in perfect order by the careful planting of fear and watering of prudence and weeding of hope.

A trophy won and ready to be restored and added to a kingdom of perfect precision, perfect clockwork, perfect perfection.

A graveyard for children, Prim's ghost foremost among them.

The end of a story. The beginning of a future. The climax of his own desperate plan.

* * *

"You wanted to kill him," Coin reminds Katniss, the first words she speaks. "Now's your chance. A war tribunal has already found him guilty of crimes too numerous to list here. This seems a fitting place for his execution."

Katniss nocks an arrow.

Snow is looking at Katniss with narrowed eyes, and whatever he sees in her, Peeta closes his mind to it (he doesn't want that image, that poison, coursing through him every time he sees Katniss after this). Maybe he does understand what is actually happening, though, because even if Snow is about to find himself checkmated, he is a skilled and cunning master of the game.

Katniss draws back the string.

His hand is empty, has been since Katniss let go of him in order to raise her weapon (but that's all right, it's the part they both agreed she must play), so Peeta is free to sidle just that bit closer to Coin. He's harmless, he's redundant, he's unimportant (maybe they're lies to ensure he gets close enough; maybe they're truths that are finally benefitting him; there's no more time to unravel that puzzle and he almost doesn't even care anymore).

Katniss fixes her eyes on the white rose in Snow's lapel.

Coin's mind is layered in frost and ice and the chill of a slow-moving glacier, gray and white and cold-blue. Absolutes and black-and-whites and extremes are all that she can understand (while across from her, Snow's mind is an endless labyrinth of plots upon schemes upon counter-attacks upon agendas upon contingencies), and Peeta uses that against her.

Katniss takes aim.

Laughter breaks the strained silence, a gurgling chuckle that grows into a wet cackle as Snow laughs and laughs and laughs. But not at his own death, no, Peeta doesn't need to see the world as Snow does to know that he has already anticipated and accounted for his own death. It's the plots and the machinations and Peeta and Katniss's clumsy gambit that makes him laugh so hard sores in his mouth and throat open, gushing forth blood tinted in ice he concealed and choked back and used as a private weapon to bring him more power (to pour into Peeta's mind while in a frost-tinted cell, trying to crack the power he couldn't understand and destroy the mind he couldn't tap).

Katniss lets the arrow fly.

And Peeta lies—lies so that Coin thinks the arrow is headed straight for that white rose marking Snow's heart, and lies so that the audience sees a girl shaking apart at an earthquake under her feet, and lies so that Snow sees the lives of all the thousands he's destroyed laid out in front of him in burning reproach.

* * *

This is the truth: "I don't think Snow killed your sister," he confessed to Katniss.

And then, every night, after they screamed for hidden cameras and prying ears, they came together and whispered beneath the sway and rattle of the train. Whispered their plans and their thoughts and their guesses. Tried to see the world as a dictator might and then tried to imagine how that dictator would fall.

This is the truth: "I want Snow to die," Katniss confessed to him.

And so Peeta promised that he would, but first, he said, he must know what he cost them all. So he drew and sketched and painted, imagining a scene filled with everyone whose lives Snow had ruined and what that hell would look like. He etched it into his mind so that when the moment came, he could draw it in Snow's mind and make it be the last thing he saw, make the horror and the inescapable truth of it stop his heart in mid-beat.

This is the truth: "We protect each other," they both promised.

Which means that Peeta can't let Katniss shoot Coin in front of all her loyal, dedicated soldiers because then they would tear her to pieces in a rage of adrenaline and confusion and bloodlust. Another way is needed, and what better way than this, to manufacture an aftershock to the earthquakes Coin herself caused (an aftershock to the tectonic upheaval of their double-edged lies, of his own rumbling anger, slow-moving but catastrophic), to pretend that there was a very (well-) ill-timed tremor that sent the Mockingjay's perfect aim astray. Not an execution that takes out Coin, then, but an accident, and one that cannot be blamed on the archer.

This is the truth: the last time Peeta told so many lies all at once, his mind broke.

This time, his mind is already fragile, already buckling under the strain of the emotions swarming around him, already so very, very tired.

* * *

Coin falls instantly, blinded and struck down in the throes of her victory, an _almost_.

Snow falls slowly, choking on his own blood and the blood of his victims, poisoned from without and within.

Peeta is the last to fall, cracks spiderwebbing across his vision and painting mirages over realities until it's all shiny and unreal.

It's okay, he decides as a bow clatters to the ground beside his face. He almost guessed this would happen, that he would fall at the same time as the presidents, and it's okay. The world is broken and burning and imperfect, but it's all only the pain of rebirth. And maybe in order for the future to be made better, all the liars must fall first, to leave room for the truths (like _Katniss_) to take root and sprout like dandelions in spring.

Besides, there's a reason there's always an expendable one in the story.


	5. Chapter 5

In the woods, when it was just her own soundless footfalls and the sway of the trees in the breeze and the rustle of something about to become her target, Katniss often found a clarity. A piercing sense of stillness so absolute, a silence so complete, that it was as if the rest of the world fell away to leave her the only thing still moving, still thinking, still breathing. As if time itself stood still and there was only her and her bow and her target.

It's been months and months, maybe even a year, since she's really, truly been in her woods (and months, too, since she's been in the forest Peeta crafted for her out of imagination and stories and sheer willpower), but here, in this moment, she feels that clarity settle over her as if the crumbling mansions are towering pines, as if the seared smoke is fresh air, as if the rubble underfoot is moss and leaves and a dandelion.

Her focus has been absolute since Peeta whispered his secret into her ear and she learned that Prim was not just an unforgettable tragedy but an unforgivable crime. Her target has been fixed since Finnick had his throat ripped out with her name still on his lips. Her bow hasn't left her hands since she saw Snow in the flesh and heard Coin's voice at her back.

But even then, with the arrow nocked and the string tickling her cheek and the world silent as an indrawn breath…she didn't have that clarity of purpose. She wasn't in that moment of piercing stillness.

No, it is after. When Coin's eye is replaced with an arrowhead. When Snow's glee is transformed into a frozen rictus of horror. When all her enemies are gone. That's when she feels that she is alone in the world, that time has crept to a halt and everything extraneous is peeled away to leave her with only that which is most important. That which she needs. That which will leave her irreparably damaged if it's destroyed.

Because that is the moment when Peeta falls.

As Coin's body hits the ground, as Snow sags against his restraints, as Katniss turns to share this moment with the boy who made it all possible, she sees it. His eyes flutter, his blue pupils obscured by bursting blood vessels. His hands shake and tremble as if the earthquake has shifted itself inside him, to rumble and groan through his steady bones, ripping fissures as deep as the scars in his mind. And his body crumples, in slow motion, in aching clarity, in awful suspension.

Katniss is already moving even before he is splayed out on the jagged ground. Her bow is gone (she doesn't care), her sheath of arrows vanishing (she doesn't care), and her knees are pierced and abraded as she falls at Peeta's side (she doesn't care).

"Peeta," she says, cradling his head in her arms, brushing aside his hair with her gloved hands. "Peeta, Peeta, Peeta."

His name, because it is what he remembers. His name, because it is what matters.

"Peeta, Peeta, Peeta."

His body shifts, and for one heart-stopping moment, she thinks he is responding to her call (as he always has, in some way or another), but no, his frame is spasming, his limbs turned limp and manic as a puppet's, a seizure that makes his eyes roll back in his head and spittle run down his jaw.

The courtyard is full of pandemonium (the result of two presidents' near simultaneous deaths), but Katniss can only hear one lone voice raised in a scream that silences everything else.

Only later, when her throat is rubbed so raw that every time she swallows she tastes copper, does she realize that it was her voice spiraling high, high above the fray.

Since Haymitch taught her to control her fire, she has always been conscious of it, sizzling beneath her skin. Since Prim died and she grew afraid of it, she has never not been aware of its damaging power eking out of her flesh against her will by way of smoke and charred fingertips and blisters. Since she's regained control and turned it into a weapon for District 13, it's grown stronger, more violent, more explosive.

Now, it dies. Just flickers and fades and falls away. With Peeta's heart stuttered to a standstill, Katniss is left only a shell filled with ash that drifts slowly away.

* * *

Haymitch brings the medics.

The medics restart Peeta's heart.

Nothing can make him wake up.

"It might have been too much for him," Haymitch translates for the doctors she doesn't hear. She hasn't told him (about Prim, about plots in the night, about Peeta's gift and the arrow meant for Coin), but she thinks her mentor's guessed most of it, if not all.

(She wonders if he's guessed that there isn't any safe place left in the world for her if Peeta doesn't stay with her.)

"I'm sorry, Katniss," Haymitch says, and just that, the way he uses her name and sounds so sincere, is what breaks her.

He folds her up in arms that help (because he knows what it's like, he understands, he's losing Peeta too) but aren't enough.

"He has to wake up," she sobs. "I need him."

"I know. And, well, if anyone can come back…it's him. Right?"

And of course. Of course Peeta can. Because he has before. Because he always comes back. Because he promised her _always_.

Back in District 12, so long ago, when she first tamed her fire and downed a Capitol hovercraft, he appeared at her side with his gift and his protection and his friendly smile, regardless of the way she'd never been able to thank him for that bread when they were kids. When she thought he'd been shot, when he'd been okay and alive and unharmed, when she'd been swept up in adrenaline and the blue of his eyes so that she kissed him…when she ran away because she didn't know what to do about the strange hunger he awoke in her…he still came back to her side as if nothing had happened. When she broke his heart and fought him tooth and nail even as his leg burned away and he was sobbing in pain and guilt and grief, he didn't abandon her. When she was captured, taken from the bed her grief and Prim's memories wouldn't let her leave, he let them take him, too, just so he could be there with her. When she forgot about him (forgot even herself), he reminded her by creating an entire world for her.

And even when _he_ forgot _her_, he still knew her name. He still smiled at her. He still asked her to be friends. He still came to her at night and chased the bad dreams away. He still gave her everything she wanted (revenge and justice and war) while also saving her life.

And he is still, always, the one to pay.

The bruise for the bread. The stress and the wounds for protecting her. The loss of his leg for dragging her from Prim's body. The broken heart for offering her everything. The erosion of his memories for giving her a safe place to adjust to a life without Prim. And now his own life, his own mind, for her vengeance.

"Oh, Peeta," she whispers, and Haymitch shudders and lets her go.

"He'll…" But he can't meet her eyes, can't give her any false promises, can't even adjure her to stay alive (because he knows, he must know, that only Peeta's survival will ensure her own).

That's all right. Haymitch doesn't have to give her any promises.

Peeta's already given her the only one that matters.

* * *

Katniss has been a hunter since she was twelve years old. The hospital corridors are easier to navigate than the woods, and the Capitol doctors are much less dangerous than the bears and wild dogs that roam parts of District 12. Like a ghost, she flits her way through the hallways, hides from any eyes that might be watching for her, and slips into Peeta's room.

He's just a boy. Seeing him there on a hospital bed, surrounded by machines and hooked up to needles, so white and so frail, she's struck by just how young he is. Only seventeen, probably not fully grown, just a shadow of pale hair on his face after all these days, nothing at all to give away how much potential he has locked within him, how much beauty he's capable of creating, how much kindness he gives out so freely.

There's a pinch behind her breastbone, a pain she's grown all too used to feeling.

Katniss ignores it and moves to the wall. Methodically, she pulls every cord from every plug, silences the beeping and the shrieking and the humming. Then she moves to Peeta and begins carefully, oh so carefully, extracting the needles from his flesh.

None of these things will bring him back. Peeta isn't broken. He's just hiding.

(He has always been a master of camouflage.)

She tears the paper-thin blanket from his limbs, doesn't flinch away from the metal of his prosthetic, doesn't let herself shrink from the task of dressing him in soft trousers and warm sweater. Then she lays herself out atop him, puts her hands against his, her feet against his ankles, her chest against his, her forehead resting on his. Slowly, gently, she reaches deep inside herself for some flicker of warmth, past the char and the ash, beneath the blackened lumps of coal, until she unearths a tiny ember in the shape of a pearl.

"Peeta," she sighs into his mouth, a taste of warmth.

She meant to ground him, to give him some reason to return to her, to remind him that he is not alone. Maybe it works, she doesn't know; what she does know is that it's far too effective for _her_, reminding her of nights spent wrapped together, both before the dream-world and after he lost his memories. Crushing her with the weight of just how much she _needs_ this to work (how much she needs his warmth and his steadiness and the emotion in his eyes whenever he looks at her).

"Peeta," she says again (because who knows if she'll have reason to say it after today and she wants to say it as often as possible).

Then she opens her mouth, and she begins to sing.

* * *

A voice. (The Voice, the Protector, the Empath). Low and soothing. A lullaby as soft as starlight, as warm as sunlight, as radiant as a victor. (The Victor. The Mockingjay. The Pyro.) Heat against his skin, reminding him that he _has_ skin, that he has a form and boundaries, that he is separate from the nothingness he's let himself sink deep underneath.

The sea engulfs him, he becomes the sea, surging and falling, washing high and ebbing low at the pull of something he'll never quite be able to reach, never be able to understand, never attain.

A song rises and falls in the same pattern as the waves, so familiar that he follows it and only too late realizes that it is _not_ the sea.

It's outside. _Other_. Separate.

His soul shudders with fear, and he tries to turn aside and lose himself once more in the nothingness (away from hurt and expectations and unreal mirages).

But that voice. _Oh_, that voice. It reminds him of things he's long forgotten. Truths he couldn't bear to face. Lies he wasn't strong enough to tell himself anymore.

* * *

The Valley Song. Deep In The Meadow. The Hanging Tree. Katniss sings them all, soft and low and soothing. When the lyrics run out and the melodies fade into each other, she keeps singing, a song made up of everything that's really important.

_Peeta _and _dandelions_ and _pearls_ and _bread_ and _come back to me_ and _stay with me_ and _I miss you_.

(All the words but the three he wanted so badly and she could never find in herself to give him. And even now they elude her, too damaging if he won't wake, too destructive if this last pseudo-embrace is all she will ever get.)

Words that matter, memories that remain, emotions she can't quite deny so that they leak out in the word that repeats over and over again, a chorus of _real_.

* * *

A long time ago, there was a little boy. Except that's not how the story starts.

A long time ago, there was a little girl, and she was nothing special, nothing memorable, until she sang. But when she opened her mouth, lit by a beam of sunshine, when she sang, she was beautiful. Her voice released some inner spark that caught him afire and he has never stopped burning since.

It's fire, and so sometimes it burns, sometimes it hurts to breathe, sometimes it's too bright and other times it's too faint, but always, he has been drawn to that spark at the center of her flame.

There's a song, and it has his name, and it's accompanied by the crackle and roar of flames, and Peeta remembers.

He remembers that little girl who started it all, and the little boy who fell silent in awe.

Something inside him stirs, rouses, stretches and strains for air, for freedom, for release.

Out of reach, there is a mockingjay, black and white, fluttering and flying high, high above him.

His heart flutters, his limbs flap, and maybe _he_ is the mockingjay. Driven dumb by a song he longs to repeat, black with pain and ribbed with the underpinnings of hope, flying toward freedom until exhausted, while beneath him, the trees wait, silent and patient, ready to bear his burdens.

"Peeta," the song calls. "Peeta, Peeta, Peeta."

And there's a flock of mockingjays taking up that call, echoing it in a disjointed lullaby that urges him onward, a chorus leading him down a twisting ravine to the music that lives in the heart of the flame.

He opens his mouth to join them and lets out the song that lives inside his own heart.

"Katniss."

* * *

Her song has degenerated into just his name, over and over again, when she feels something. Beneath her chin, she thinks his lips move, can feel the sweep of his breath against the corner of her mouth.

Her heart stutters as she opens her eyes…and sees Peeta staring up at her. Blue, red-rimmed and bruised and so very brilliant, ringed in lashes so long they tickled her cheeks when she leaned her brow on his.

"Peeta!" she gasps. "You're awake!"

Silent, he stares.

Katniss has half-fallen off him in shock. She cautions herself to patience.

"Do…do you remember me?"

Her breath is frozen in her lungs, her fire deserting her, as she waits (remembers another hospital room, another staring match between her and Peeta, another outpouring of relief turned cold and damp when she realized that he no longer knew her).

His nod is slow, but confident.

Katniss wants to break down and sob right then, and would if there were time. Instead, she pushes herself upright and weaves her fingers through his.

"Peeta, let's go."

He's slow and confused, but she helps him sit up and maneuver his feet to the floor.

"Come on," she urges. Now that he's awake and here (_alive_, her heart sings), she's consumed with a panicked impatience, a desperate desire to be out of here and safe (to be _home_).

Forcing her hands to steadiness, Katniss guides his feet into the shoes she stole from a locker down the hall, and double-knots them for him. Peeta watches her, docile and compliant. She hopes he has enough energy to get to the train.

When she takes his hand and tugs him toward the door, he follows, his eyes on his feet, as if walking requires all his attention.

Katniss leads him through the hospital, slipping them ahead of any curious attention, maneuvering him out a side door she found while pacing and pulling her hair waiting for news on his condition.

"Come on, Peeta," she says, trying to get him to walk faster than the slow, measured tread he seems intent on keeping.

His hand tightens around hers, but when she looks back at him, he's staring at her curiously.

"Do you trust me?" she asks.

He nods. Every muscle in Katniss's body relaxes.

"Okay. Then let's go home. Please, Peeta, let's…let's just go home."

It takes a long moment, but his smile unfurls, bit by bit, until he is radiant.

Katniss basks in his light, and leads him to the train.

* * *

They're halfway to District 12 before Katniss realizes that something's wrong. She thought Peeta was quiet because he was exhausted and drained and maybe dehydrated. But he sleeps on the train, curled in on himself and refusing to let go of her hand, and he drinks the bottle of water she swipes for him, and eats the dinner she squirreled away while sitting beside Haymitch and picking at food she couldn't imagine eating.

And still he says nothing.

"Peeta," she says (her heart in her throat), "you do remember me, right?"

He nods, and smiles, and strokes her wrist with his thumb.

"You…" She swallows (wishes her heart would go back to its proper place in her chest). "Can you talk?"

There's a long beat of silence…and then he shrugs. Still swiping his thumb back and forth over her pulse point, he looks out the window, his eyes drinking in the passing scenery in a way he hadn't while they were traveling through District 2 for the propos.

It worries her. It seems wrong, somehow, for him to be so silent, as if their positions have been reversed once more.

But he's alive. He's alive, and he remembers her, and in the end, that's what matters most.

So Katniss leans her head on Peeta's shoulder and breathes in the scent of cinnamon and dill.

* * *

The house District 13 arranged for her after her original home (where memories of her father resided) was destroyed still stands. Haymitch's and Peeta's do too, all of them tall, lonely sentinels above a District still rebuilding from the savage attacks between Snow and Coin.

Katniss keeps Peeta's hand in hers, shrugs her sheath of arrows higher on her back, and firms her jaw. Home is home, no matter what. So she ignores the smoke trailing up from the still-burning mines, the mass grave where the meadow used to be, the heaps of rubble where the merchant square once stood. Peeta's hand tightens around hers to the point of pain, but she remains silent, lets him have that point of grounding contact.

There are a few people here already, digging and burying and rebuilding. They nod at Katniss and continue about their business. Katniss nods back and walks on (that familiar pinch twisting against her breastbone at the absence of Peeta's friendly chatter).

When they reach what's become known, somewhat informally, as the Victor's Village, Katniss automatically heads for her house. Peeta follows without complaint. Something about his compliance makes her stop in her tracks (or maybe it's simple cowardice and the abrupt realization that she hasn't been back in her house since just after Prim's death; since they dragged her from it and took her to a white cell).

"Come on, Peeta," she says, and turns them, instead, toward his house.

He follows just as easily, just as willingly, and she wonders if he remembers that it is his. She wonders if he knows what this place is, or if any of it means anything to him at all. She wonders how much he remembers (and if he even _wants_ to remember the rest).

The door's unlocked and they track snow into the living room. Katniss finds herself staring at the trail of white for a long moment, only becomes aware of it when Peeta finally tugs at her hand to get her moving again.

Snow, she thinks (a flash of a man with white hair and a white rose and a white smile turned red and gaping).

Snow, she thinks (and remembers a story told in the warmth between ovens, a tidbit dredged up from her mind to make a kind young baker smile, a scene frosted to make her smile in return).

"I'll get a fire started," she finally says, because Peeta needs to be kept warm. He does, she remembers, belong near a hearth.

* * *

They split to separate bedrooms to change for bed, and too late, Katniss realizes that maybe he thinks this means they should sleep in separate rooms, too. She can't. She can't go back to the nightmares and the loneliness and the _missing him_. Not when he's right here, silent, but still willing to hold her hand and follow her into death and exile alike.

Heart pounding in her throat and the tips of her fingers, Katniss steals back across the hallway to his bedroom. Her knuckles brush the wood in the softest of knocks, and the door turns inward. Peeta's already climbing into bed beneath the covers he retrieved from a closet.

"I…" She swallows. More than anything, she wants to just walk across the room, slide into the bed next to him, and avoid this entire awkward in-between. But…but even when she could never find the words to say, Peeta was always respectful of her decisions. So she twists the end of her braid in her fingers and chokes out, "I was wondering if…if we could…"

Peeta pulls back the blankets with an inviting gesture.

Even without words, he is so good at communicating.

Blinking back tears she's afraid to acknowledge, Katniss nestles up against Peeta's warmth. Rests her head on his chest. Falls asleep to the soothing lull of his heartbeat, strong and steady and sure.

* * *

For the first few days, Katniss lets them fall into a routine. Sae arrives the first morning with bags full of supplies, and she stays long enough to make them eggs and sausage and fill them in on the names of those who are here and those who are coming and those who are gone forever. Katniss and Peeta sit together at the table while Katniss catalogs what Sae brought and calculates how many trips to the woods it will take to repay her.

"Glad to see you both here," Sae finally says, very quietly, and then she slips away.

Katniss can't take a bite until Peeta begins to eat. Then, watching him (safe and fed and well), she can look to her own plate and realize, in a vague sort of way, that she's hungry.

After breakfast, after they've stood side by side to do the dishes, Peeta gives her a soft smile as he looks toward the door, then he turns and walks away. Katniss can't help the immediate terror that assails her every sense. On silent feet, she follows him, up the stairs, down the hallway, into a room that explodes with color.

Canvases and paints and cloths and brushes, all of it in a hodgepodge of chaos lacking in every other part of Peeta's life. Peeta bends to select an empty canvas; his eyes slide toward her in a familiar way, one that brings back countless memories (of school and a hungry childhood; of a dreamworld and a quiet baker). He knows she's there, but he lets her hang back as he sets the canvas on an easel and begins to test his paints, setting aside those that have dried or cracked.

Eventually, Katniss makes herself back away. As much as she would like to stay and watch (to make _sure_ that her Peeta is back), she knows that they both need their space. Time to adjust to their new realities. Time to regrow all the scars that have been sanded so raw.

So she collects her bow and arrows and heads for her woods (avoiding the meadow). Peeta will need to eat tonight.

* * *

The next several days are nearly identical. She hunts. Peeta paints. Sae drops by for breakfast, bringing with her the bits of supplies they need and all the little bits of news that connect them to the District. In exchange, Katniss gives her wild game and Peeta gives her smiles, and Sae rewards them by not asking them any questions.

After dinner, Peeta builds up a fire and Katniss drifts closer and closer to him until he opens his arms and she curls up close beside him. In those moments, she thinks about going upstairs to the bedroom she only used that first night, as a changing room, and digging through the single bag she brought with her. She thinks about retrieving the sketchbook Haymitch gave her when he told her there was a chance Peeta might never wake up again. She thinks about flipping the pages open (the way she did, so briefly, in the hospital outside Peeta's room) and glimpsing into his mind.

But she never does. Maybe she's just afraid of what Peeta really sees when he looks at her (now, without all the rosy-hazed memories of his adolescent crush) or maybe she just doesn't want him to know that she pried into his private thoughts. Maybe she's just afraid to ruin the delicate balance they've established.

So night after night, they sit together and stare into the fire.

Gradually, though, night by night, the silence grows suffocating.

* * *

At night, they curl close together on the bed and remind each other they are not alone.

Katniss wakes screaming, and Peeta kisses her hair and wraps her tight against him until all that exists is cinnamon and heat and safety.

Sometimes she wakes for no reason she can discern at all until she turns and sees Peeta stiff and motionless, his eyes rolling beneath his lids. She hums fragmented lullabies and pours her warmth into him through sweeping caresses along his brow and back through his hair until he wakes, and sees her, and relaxes.

In some ways, the nights are longer than the days. In other ways, they are far too short.

* * *

When she wakes on the fifth morning to the smell of fresh-baked bread, Katniss leaves her bow in the closet.

She strides into the kitchen to watch Peeta pulling a loaf from the oven with a sad sort of peace written across his face.

"Bread," she says (because he won't). "You remember how to make it."

He nods and offers her a piece, so hot it would burn her hands if she didn't hold the power of fire beneath her skin.

It tastes just as good as always.

"Peeta," she says, "let's go for a walk today, all right? I want to show you something."

His hesitation is probably no more than a breath, though it makes her mind stutter and her heart skip a beat. But then he smiles and nods, and raises a slice of bread to his own mouth.

Katniss eats three slices herself, then wonders why she still feels so very hungry.

* * *

She makes him put on his jacket and a coat she digs up from a closet, then she wraps one of her dad's own scarves around his throat and plops a hat over his curls. When she drops her eyes back to his, she's surprised to see him staring at her with something very naked and exposed in his eyes. Something that looks a lot like tenderness. Like affection. (But then, she's all he has left, isn't she?)

"Ready?" she asks.

A hint of pink flushes his cheeks as he reaches forward and tugs her own coat closed, does up the buttons for her. Katniss's breath stutters as it leaves her mouth, his effect on her given away by the clouds of stumbling mist pouring from her lips.

There was a light snowfall during the night, so they leave behind two trails of footprints, one soft and barely there, the other deep and enduring. Katniss likes the look of them, the way they complement each other, the way they're so obviously side by side.

Peeta tenses when they head toward the town, even going so far as to take her hand and tug gently back toward the house. But Katniss shakes her head and turns his gaze toward the woods.

"I'll protect you," she says, watching closely to see if he remembers.

After a moment of staring at the trees, Peeta sighs and nods, squeezing her hand reassuringly (she wonders how he is always the one reassuring her even when she is the one trying to give back to him).

Before, in the world he made for her, when she imagined this moment, she thought she would have to help him crawl through the wire fence. She imagined that his words would fill the forest as easily as the sound of his footfalls. She pictured the look of wide-eyed awe and his gratitude that she was showing him this.

Turns out, only one of those actually happens.

The fence was torn down long ago, even before District 13 arrived. Peeta is as silent now as the day they arrived. But his eyes are wide and his hand never lets go of hers, and it's so much better than she ever thought it could be.

The woods are hers, sacred and inviolable. But Peeta…somehow, for all his loud noise, he has a way of creeping up on her, a way of never sneaking once but somehow integrating himself into every part of her life until she can't imagine him not there. Can't imagine not _wanting_ him there.

It's too warm, really, probably one of the last snowfalls of winter, and the snow frosting the branches is already mostly gone. Katniss ignores her pang of disappointment; there will be other winters.

"I don't know if you remember this," she says when they reach the rock where she often stopped to eat her lunch and look out over the valley, "but you used to tell me stories. We were both trapped in a terrible place, and I…I was broken. But you never gave up on me."

Peeta sits beside her on the rock. No one's ever sat beside her before; she's surprised by how much she likes the weight and the feel of him there. For all that the snow is melting, though, it's cold. Katniss weaves her fingers through his and wills her warmth to soak into him. His eyes widen and then he gives a breathy little chuckle, childlike in his joy.

Unable to resist any longer (unable to look into his eyes while she says this), Katniss leans her head against his shoulder.

"Peeta," she says, "I don't know why you're not talking, and I'm not sure how much or what you remember. But when I stopped talking…when I forgot everything but what hurt most…you told me stories. I'm not very good at telling stories, or talking at all really, but I'm going to try, okay? For you."

His head tips to lean on hers, and Katniss closes her eyes over the tears that burn down her cheeks.

The woods are hers. They're safe. They're filled with good memories. Here, it's okay to talk. Here, with Peeta at her side, it's all right to try new things.

"Once," she says very softly, in a world of white, with a boy adjoining her, replacing the sound of screams with the sound of words and letting the world around her drink in the emotion painting her tone. "Once, there was a boy. He didn't think he was anything special at all—in fact, if he were to make an image of himself in another world, he would make him small and stumbling and almost invisible. But really, the boy was beautiful. He was kind and good and he could make anyone smile. He had a gift, and it wasn't a voice that could make anyone see anything he envisioned. It was the ability to see good in anything and everything, and the desire to make that good come true."

Peeta's sigh is soft, shuddering, warm on the crown of her head. His tears fall from his cheeks down to hers, seasoned with salt. And Katniss keeps talking.

* * *

There was a girl.

That's how all his stories start.

There was a girl, and she sang the mockingjays silent.

There was a girl, and she was on fire and the world was on fire with her.

There was a girl, and he loved her, he loved her, he loves her.

There is a girl.

(He thinks, maybe, this is how all his stories end too.)

There is a girl, and the world blinked against her light and named her Mockingjay. They blinked again and craned nearer to hear the voice of the boy who stood beside her and stared at her with his heart in his eyes. They blinked and blinked and blinked, and he thinks that they saw everything wrong, distorted, just ever so slightly _off_.

They called the girl the Mockingjay and they named the boy the Voice, but he thinks they got it wrong.

There is a girl, and she sings, and he falls silent.

There is a girl, and she speaks, and he follows her, step by hesitant step, entranced, enspelled (in love).

There is a girl, and she's still here. There's a whole world out there who'd embrace her in a heartbeat, but she came to his room and she breathed melodies into his skin and she led him forth by the hand. She sleeps in his bed and she sits at his table and she stays in his house (and she turns everything from _his_ to _theirs_).

There is a girl.

But that's not how her story starts.

* * *

There is a boy, she says, and he remembers.

He remembers a boy born to a baker who dreamed once of something else and lived with that disappointment kneaded into his flesh. A boy born to a woman who couldn't forget, couldn't forgive, couldn't look past the sins to see the reality. A boy born with art in his heart and beauty in his eyes and pain in his flesh.

He remembers a boy who heard a song, and could have chosen to forget it…but didn't. Instead, he chose to remember. He chose to keep remembering, even when it hurt (_especially_ when it hurt). He watched a song from afar and tried to memorize it in case he never heard it again. And when the song was almost quenched, he took up his own voice (a mockingjay in truth, repeating and singing in chorus and repeating again until it's jumbled and garbled and the truth became lies) and wove that voice into armor.

He remembers a boy who dared to dream of something better, who tried to sing but burned instead. He remembers a boy who didn't know how to fight without the music there to guide him and give him a reason and a cause. He remembers a boy who faded away in a white cell and let his mind break in a dreamworld.

And finally, he remembers a boy with a fractured mind and a fragmented past who nonetheless remembered what was most important (like a mockingjay who hears a familiar tune and follows it back to learn it all over again). A boy who took pieces of his past and stitched them back together, who curled up in the dark around a melody always just out of reach, who lied to tumble down a kingdom full of lies.

There is a boy, she says (and there's no past tense in her voice, no _has been_, no _was_, just the beautiful potential of the present). There is a boy, and he is hers.

She speaks, and he remembers who he was and who he is.

She sings, and he imagines what could be.

There is a girl. That's how his story starts.

There is a boy. That's how her story starts.

(He hopes their stories can merge and mingle and interweave, as potent as a lie amid truth, as truth amidst lies.

He hopes their story can be one.)

* * *

After their trip to the woods, the silence doesn't bother them anymore. Whenever she feels that the quiet is growing too powerful, Katniss opens her mouth and begins to tell more stories. She thought she would run out, that the words would dry up and she'd be left stammering and desperate to conjure up a few more syllables. But she doesn't. Instead, she always finds more to say.

This is Peeta's story, and it is long and complicated, but simple and enduring at the same time.

As they sit together in the evenings, staring into the fire, she recounts the days of their childhood, both stealing glances, watching from afar, sneaking sidelong looks, eyes skittering away whenever they were caught. She never grows tired of telling the story of the rain and the bread and the dandelion.

(The first time she tells that story, Peeta's eyes grow wide and his jaw drops. She thinks on the dreamworld, and the way dream-Peeta was so surprised to realize that she remembered the bread; she thinks that maybe he never meant for her to remember it. Maybe he always hoped that she wasn't as hungry as she was, wasn't as desperate. And maybe, _certainly_, he never has really understood how important and kind he was to her in that moment…in every moment.)

When they're wrapped around each other at night, sleep eluding them and nightmares hounding them, she drives away the darkness by telling him the story of their first alliance. The partnership that became a symbol and the fight that became a revolution. She tells him that he was brave and strong and resourceful, that he never let her get away with consigning him to her past, that he always knew just what to say or do to make her feel better and keep her going.

(She can't look at Peeta as she tells this story, cannot meet his eyes as she thinks back to that day so long ago, when Haymitch told her that the people were responding to her and Peeta side by side, that she needed to keep playing to that if she wanted Prim to be safe. She thought Peeta was given the same advice, thought that they were playing parts, but when she kissed him and he kissed her back until she grew dizzy and hungry…when she asked him why he was still there, fighting and risking his life…well, then she realized that he wasn't playing a part. He'd never acted at all. Everything he did was honest and pure.)

In the mornings, while he bakes bread and she pretends not to be staring, she weaves the hardest part of the story (lets the smells of bread and _Peeta_ comfort her, while the familiar tasks of baking and creating provide a refuge for him). She relives the day he told her he loved her, with his eyes so bright and his smile so sweet and shy. The moment she stared and was silent and ran away. The heartbreak she wasn't fast enough to avoid seeing there in the hollowness of his eyes. The trap she ran headlong into, desperate to escape herself and what she'd done to the boy with the bread. The sting of pain in her abdomen, the morphling carrying her in drugged arms, the fire that woke her. The girl that burned. The sight of his hair dimmed with ash and his eyes blue as the heart of flame, running straight into the explosion for her, never faltering, never stopping, no matter how she screamed and wept and thrashed. No matter the burning debris that hit his leg and cost him so much.

(This part of the story is marred and delayed, often, by the sobs that shake her chest and the long silences she drifts into without realizing, her eyes so full of Prim and fire and loss that she loses sight of what's in front of her. Until Peeta takes her hand in his, his skin powdery with flour, and stares at her. Patient. Accepting.)

Together, as they walk her woods (searching out beauty rather than hunting survival), she tells him of the world he made for her. The sweet simplicity of it, the stark reality of it. She tells him that he never tried to put himself into it, that he kept himself in the background, until he realized that he was dying. She tells him that as much as he tried, she couldn't let him fade away. She saw him, she kept seeing him, she focused on him until he became the person he really is, the person she knows him to be. She reminds him of the cheese buns he tried to gift her with and her stubborn unwillingness to let any part of him go. She admits (to him and to herself) that the only way she could let Prim go was to save _him_.

(He stops in mid-step, then, and pulls her close, cups her face in his hand, rubs her tears away with his thumb, and he has never been so beautiful. He's safe and well, no bruises, no welts, no blood pouring from his nose as he takes on too much for her sake. Scarred, yes, and thin still, but warm and growing strong. Still quiet, but he's here, he listens and he watches her and sometimes, if she is very lucky, she will catch him looking at her out of the corner of his eye, and he will quickly turn away when he realizes she's noticed, and it will almost feel like nothing's changed. Like he could still love her.)

At dinner, she finally reaches the part of the story that most confuses her. She tells him that the gift she grew to fear when Prim burned to ash, the fire that turned against her in the cell so that it burned only her and left blisters on her skin, swelled once more to wakeful power when Peeta needed her most. She remembers the way the walls came down and the stillness of Peeta's body until she breathed life back into the dying embers of his soul. She talks about the way Finnick and Johanna helped her carry him away from Snow's prison, took them to a District 13 waystation, where Coin sent a hovercraft and Haymitch to collect them. She tells him about the new deal they made, Peeta's life and health for the Mockingjay. She tries to put into words just how scared she'd been every day, forced to go out and fight battles while wondering if Peeta was still alive, if he'd ever wake up.

(Peeta stops eating. Just stares at the soup she dished out for him.)

She thinks about Effie, the person put in charge of them when District 13 first joined the fight, making sure they always got where they needed to be and keeping them camera-ready. She remembers how Effie had come to her and told her that if she wanted to see Peeta, she'd have to fight for it. Have to throw the weight of the Mockingjay behind the demand. So Katniss had, and Coin had agreed (and if they were not enemies before, that was when Coin must have decided the Mockingjay couldn't survive to rouse another revolution), and Katniss had been allowed to see Peeta.

(Peeta's spoon makes little ripples in the broth as his hand shakes.)

Katniss's voice is expressionless, drained of emotion (or just not enough to contain all the emotion that comes with it), as she relays the moment she came to his room. Stood in front of him. Heard him speak her name, and realized that he was okay. He was safe. He was well. And then…and then…_Do I know you_?

(The spoon splashes soup over the table as he drops it. His hands form white-knuckled fists around the edge of the table, clinging so hard the wood buckles.)

"And then…I don't know," Katniss says. "I tried to tell you stories then, too, but I wasn't brave enough to do it while you were awake, so I snuck in while you were sleeping. Only, you weren't sleeping. You were listening, and you offered to be friends, and maybe that's still what you want, I don't know. But you were my friend, you _are_ my friend, always helping me, protecting me, saving me. Maybe your memories came back. Maybe you'll never get them back. Maybe these stories are all we'll ever have. I don't know, I…I've never been very good at reading you, you know. That's why I liked when you talked, because you never made me wonder. You always told me the truth."

And Peeta breaks.

His shoulders shake and his hands cover his face and heavy sobs rip through him.

Alarmed, Katniss dives across the table, spilling both bowls of soup and their water cups in her haste to reach him and wrap her arms around him.

"It's okay," she says, but her voice is ragged with panic and she's not really sure that it _is_ okay. "Peeta! Peeta! Peeta, stay with me, please, I'm sorry, I…I didn't mean…I don't know."

She tries singing, humming, crooning his name, and the sobs quiet, but he won't bring his hands down from his face.

Growing desperate, Katniss wraps herself tighter around him, breathes some of her warmth into him to counteract the chills that shake his frame. "Peeta, tell me something," she begs. "Tell me anything. Please, _please_, talk to me! Tell me what's wrong. Tell me what I can do to fix it."

But he doesn't speak. Instead, he eventually grows tired and leans into her. She helps him stand as he averts his face from her, helps him upstairs and into bed. She unties his double-knotted laces and cracks the windows open for him and wonders, since he didn't eat any supper, if she should make him a cup of unsweetened tea.

Gingerly, afraid he doesn't want her there, Katniss perches at his side. He curls closer to her, lets out a shaky sigh when she threads her fingers through his hair. A few moments later, lulled by her quiet humming, he sleeps.

Katniss stays awake long into the night, and thinks that no nightmare could be more terrifying than this.

(She's beginning to think that she can't help Peeta heal.

She's beginning to fear that this is all that is left of them.)

* * *

This is his truth: he is a liar.

This is his lie: he is honest.

This is her truth: he is good and kind and brave.

This is her lie: he is good enough for her.

This is his nightmare: he has lied this entire reality into existence. In his exhaustion and his pain and his fear, he has written himself a world where he is the hero and she is in love with him and they are happy together.

This is his fear: he will wake up one day, when his strength gives out and his gift fails him, and find that Katniss is gone, fled of her own volition or killed in the square when his lies weren't enough to save her. He will find that he has always been alone, that he has never been loved, and that he alone survives to face a lifetime of empty days and lonely nights.

She thinks he is brave, and doesn't know that he is too cowardly to test this dream-like reality of his.

She thinks he is kind, and doesn't know that he has always ever been selfish with her, eager to win a place at her side, desperate to earn her approval, longing to be given her love.

She thinks he is good, and doesn't seem to realize that he is a liar and that the gift that saved her could also be used to destroy them both.

(Better, he knew in that courtyard when Coin and Snow fell and spring finally came, for all the liars to perish. But here he lives, she brought him back, and he cannot speak now, in this new and better world—not when he is afraid that only lies are left inside him. Better to remain silent than let out the darkness inside him to taint whatever good is left.)

* * *

The flour is white, light and dry, silky and barely there against his fingers, a powder-thin layer to armor him against all the disappointments life throws his way. Peeta blinks and the flour's darker, grainier, not nearly so fine; he blinks again and the tesserae flour is once more pale and thinly ground. Too used to things flickering from one reality to another, Peeta ignores it. What matters is that there is flour, and cheese at his elbow, yeast and eggs and a few spices all laid out waiting for him.

(He made these with tesserae grain before, once, though perhaps that doesn't count since he's only ever tasted them made from white flour, and so that's exactly what the end result tasted like in his mind and in Katniss's dream.)

The index card feels much more real, the pen reassuringly (or deceptively?) solid as he lines it up with the recipe card.

He doesn't hear her enter the kitchen, this ghost who haunts him and keeps him company. He feels her, though, a quiet, patient presence with the scent of pine, the sound of rain, the brightness of a dandelion, the aftertaste of heat and fire (the memory of a heart broken but resilient, a hope crushed but alive). His gift is quiescent now (as quiet as his voice? or just completely tied up in making this world for him?), but still there, waiting in his shadow.

"Peeta," she says softly (he doesn't think he'll ever grow tired of her saying his name, _seeing_ him and recognizing him and thinking him worthwhile enough to name).

With one of his hands curved over the solid counter (testing the realness of his surroundings), Peeta turns to face her. His smile is involuntary, an instinctive reaction to the sight of her, so alive, so _clear_, so beautiful. More radiant than the sun outlining her form.

Her eyes flick from him to the ingredients to the flour he's spread over the countertop, then to the cheese he requested from Sae specifically by way of a note. Realization filters slowly, than all once, into her face.

"Cheese buns?" she asks, giving him the opportunity to nod, like a pseudo-conversation. "You're making them?"

In answer, Peeta takes her hand and tugs her gently to his side (there's a girl; there's a boy; he wants there to be, instead, also, a _couple_, a team, a pair).

Katniss comes willingly, but her entire body stiffens when she catches sight of the blank index card and waiting pen.

"You remember," she whispers, her eyes flying to his (she's so brave, so willing to confront, to _know_, to fight for what matters to her; he's always envied her that). "Everything?"

His surroundings might be a delusion, her presence and the softness in her face when she looks at him might be no more than a mirage, but his smile is _real_. Using only a single, feather-light finger, he strokes a line down her woven braid, liking the texture of it (liking that his finger leaves a trail of white behind, proof that he is here).

He does remember. Everything. Each detail. All the days of battle and the nights of terror. The overlooked, treasured hours when they weren't soldiers at all, but children instead, laughing together at Haymitch and Effie, joking with dark humor that combated the night (their relationship hasn't been built entirely on death and tragedy, but slowly, joke by laugh by shared understanding).

Tentatively, Peeta lifts her hand (every time he touches her, he's half afraid she'll vanish, either running away from him or just disintegrating into his madness) and lays the pen within the curve of her fingers. He almost can't bear to look up, to see what her reaction is, but this is too important, too _necessary_, so he is brave (as brave as she thinks him).

He finds her neutral. Patient. Perhaps he could peek beneath the layers of her mind to see what lies beneath the mask, but he doesn't. Sometimes, life is there to be lived, not to be skipped.

His heart pounds in his ears, louder than Katniss's movement as she sets herself at his side and lets her hand and the pen rest atop the blank card.

(She doesn't flee, her braid the last thing he sees of her as she disappears like a wild mockingjay, too nervous and wild to be tamed. She doesn't vanish, only a vagary of his battered mind and wounded spirit.)

Step by step, Peeta makes the cheese buns, each movement given careful deliberation. This is something he never forgot (even tied up in a bed and given over to the sea, he could have made these had they only placed the ingredients in his hand and set him near an oven), and with each egg cracked, each shred of cheese and turn of the dough, he feels more and more like himself.

(Truth or lie, he feels himself caring less and less, giving himself over completely to the reality shaped around him.)

Katniss watches, patient and silent, smiling and absorbed in his every move. Peeta can feel the weight of her gaze, the heft of the dough, the heat of the oven, the currents in the air and the tension between them, simmering as it always has (on his side, at least). Real. So real. And yet…everything he's ever wanted (and if Peeta knows one thing from all his returned memories, it is that he has never once been given everything he wants, so how can he trust this?).

They stand side by side and watch the timer tick down until it's the last sixty seconds, a countdown they watch as if their life depends on it.

His breath is caught in his lungs, his chest ready to explode from the pressure, by the time it chimes twelve times and Katniss catches his hands to give him the cloth before he pulls the pan from the oven with his bare hands. Together, they look down at the finished product.

"They're amazing, Peeta," she says (playing her part and reciting her lines). "The best things I've ever tasted."

Shaking his head, Peeta picks one up and offers it to her (because he doesn't want the act anymore).

Something deep and dark, tragic and hopeful, moves there in the clear depths of her eyes as she takes the food from his hand (the way he should have handed her the bread instead of tossing it as if to an animal). It's hot enough to still be steaming, but he knows she will not be burned. She takes a bite, and her eyes flutter closed, and Peeta can breathe again.

"Amazing," she says again when one, two, three of the buns are gone before he can even finish turning the oven off and loosening the bottoms of the rest from the pan. "You have one now."

He eats, because it seems important to her that he does, some quirk he hasn't quite puzzled out yet. But as soon as the last bite is swallowed (only two more buns left, but there's more ingredients in the pantry and more to be had besides; there will be other batches), he's nudging the pen to her fingers and nodding to the recipe card.

Katniss wipes her mouth and looks down at his gesture, then back up to him, then down again.

Then she goes feral. She's wild, untamed, savage in her sudden ferocity as she throws the pen to the far side of the kitchen, rips the recipe card into pieces and crumples those pieces and strews them along the floor, screaming all the while. Peeta flinches away (an instinct engrained, an impulse overpowered), then tries to reach for her, to ground her and calm her.

But she refuses to be calmed.

"No!" she shouts, over and over again. "No, Peeta, no, I won't, I won't! No!"

Her cheeks are streaked with tears and flour, her hands like talons as she strains for him and tears at his shirt, clenching it in fists to shake him, so close he is intoxicated, so savage he is disoriented.

"You can't leave me!" she demands in a tone so hoarse it is as if he has strangled her. "I won't memorize this recipe. You have to stay, Peeta. You're the only one, why won't you believe me, you're the only one who can make them, and I won't, I never will, how could you think I'd ever eat them again if you were gone, why are you doing this, you can't give up!"

A litany so ceaseless, so emotional, that it sounds like a song (of grief, of fear, of _love_). No, not a song, not a melody at all.

It's a growl, a low thrumming in his bones, a warning and a wild plea, and she isn't the Mockingjay (he is), for she is the lioness (wild and beautiful), protecting her pride and nurturing those in her care.

She's savage and unhinged and uncontrollable—and this is not a dream.

It's not a lie.

She's real, real in a way that has captivated him since he was five years old and first caught sight of her (because he forgot, it isn't the song that first made him notice her; he'd already pointed her out, the little girl in the red dress that reflected the sunlight and scattered orange refractions against the coal-darkened wall).

She's real, and this is not his lies given shape to protect his own heart.

_Real_.

This is her, pure and undiluted.

Her—choosing to come for him in the hospital. Taking his hand and asking if he trusted her. Inviting herself into his home and coming to his bed. Allowing him into her woods and letting him guide her into the kitchen.

(She told him this part of the story too, in every moment, every action, but he didn't realize it was part of the story.)

_Katniss_.

Her fire is so near that he catches alight. Because she is brave, he is brave, reaches past her desperate embrace that seems like an attack (because wild animals don't know their own strength, don't know what effect they have) and wraps her in his arms. Because she is good, he can be good enough too, groping past the remains of his lies to let out the truths that form the very foundation of who he is.

"Katniss," he says (because that matters most and it has been far too long since he dared say it).

She goes utterly still in his arms.

(He is still brave.)

"I'll stay, as long as you want me, _always_."

She stares up at him, her claws turned into caresses, her tears into hope as wild and untamable as her.

(He isn't quite as brave as her, but he is hopeful and that's just as good.)

"I love you."

The truth on which everything else lies. The truth that could never be erased or undone or pretended away. The truth that repeats itself and propagates itself and multiplies more with every thought of her, every glimpse, every touch.

"Peeta," she whispers.

And with his name on her lips, he catches her up (the mockingjay and the lioness) and kisses her. A wild kiss, gentled and softened. A fierce embrace, tender and enduring.

Katniss kisses him back (and this is so much more than he could have ever dreamed, dared ever imagine, or envisioned real enough to shape it into a pocket-world).

_Real_.

Truth, she is all truth, and at her touch, his lies melt and burn and are refined into truths to match hers.

* * *

She has no more story to tell him, all caught up and swept into the sound of his voice reclaimed. Katniss would have let Peeta kiss her forever, but Haymitch has wonderful timing as ever, and stumps into the house to tell them he's returned. There's talk of the deals he made on their behalf and the agreement for them to live here so long as they don't make trouble for the government. Katniss nods and grumbles and does everything Haymitch would expect of her, while the whole time, Peeta's thumb rubs back and forth against her pulse point, making her stomach growl in hunger for something that's not food.

Haymitch looks suspiciously between the two, then shrugs and awkwardly clasps a hand to Peeta's shoulder. "Glad to see you haven't reached the end of your nine lives yet, boy." He swipes the last of the cheese buns and slinks away, probably to a bottle of clear liquid to dull his smoky flames and burning memories.

After that…well, Katniss isn't quite sure. Peeta started baking more cheese buns, and Katniss watched him for a while (mainly to make certain he wasn't going to try to write down the recipe again) before slipping away to try to puzzle out what is stirring inside her (what's been stirring since the first time he gave her the bread, since the dandelion, since Effie made an offhand comment and Katniss realized that if pearls really did come from coal, then Peeta is that pearl, bright and shining against the shadows of District 12).

At night, after a dinner of cheese buns and some fried squirrel meat, they move to the living room. Katniss lets Peeta build the fire, like always, lets him sit first, like always, then doesn't let herself hesitate before curling up beside him and nuzzling in close (not like always, different, every touch scorching through her and setting off cataclysms that set off more, a chain reaction that seems to have no ending point so long as Peeta remains _Peeta_).

But she didn't come empty-handed. After a moment of breathing in his scent (wishing he would speak so she can reassure herself it really happened), Katniss pulls out the sketchbook that's been hidden in her bag since the first day after the deaths in the courtyard.

"Peeta," she hands him the book, "will you tell me a story?"

(Because all her stories are told, but he still has a few loose ends to tie up.)

Peeta takes the book and lets it fall open to the page Haymitch was most concerned about. A mockingjay skewered by an arrow and falling from the sky, wisps of smoke spiraling in its wake.

"This…" He pauses, probably to think, though Katniss uses it to feel that pinch behind her breastbone easing and softening and turning warm and liquid at the sound of his voice. "This isn't me."

"Who is it?" she asks, quietly so as not to startle him back into silence.

"When I woke up…everything was too close. I—_me, Peeta_—was lost, so everything else could get in. The things people saw, the things they wished and dreamed or feared and dreaded…all of it was swirling there in the air and my mind was like the net that caught them all. This…this is Coin."

"I wondered."

"Of course," there's a note of wry humor that makes her glance up at him, "it could be _me_. I feel like I'm the mockingjays who sat outside the school on our first day and stared at the prettiest singer they'd ever heard or seen. I've been a goner ever since."

"I didn't shoot you," she says with a roll of her eyes (secretly delighted by this side of Peeta that's been missing so long; does he know, can he tell, that she's so happy to be here with him?). She turns to another page, this one a bow made of flames. "And this one?" she asks.

"That was the first thing I drew. I didn't know what it meant, but…maybe I did, somewhere deep inside me. I was broken, Katniss, and you were a precious secret that I had to keep hidden, even from myself."

How does he always do this? Know the right things to say to reach past her armor and leave her blinking away tears and luxuriating in the feeling of sweetness melting at the center of her chest?

"And this?" she starts to ask, flipping to a page with a trap snapping closed over an ice figurine, but Peeta stops her by shutting the sketchbook and setting it aside.

"None of that is real," he says very seriously. "None of that is me. Have you been up to my painting room lately?"

She shakes her head, caught by the intent look in his eye, the way he is leaning closer to her, the breadth of his shoulders and the glint of firelight against his hair.

"_That's_ me, and do you know what those canvases are covered with?"

Another shake of her head as her fingers come to rest, trembling, on the curve of his shoulders and the smoothness of his neck.

"It's the forest," he whispers against her brow, the words accompanied by a kiss. "And the trees frosted in white," against the corner of her eye with another kiss, his eyelashes tickling. "And the snow melting away because spring is finally here," against her cheek, his mouth parting. "And the dandelions growing outside while inside the hearthfire is strong and alight and welcoming," against her chin, his mouth drugging her with words and kisses. "It's you, Katniss," he says, "it's always been you."

And she runs out of patience, setting her hands on either side of his face and covering his mouth with her own, swallowing up his words and his hope and his kindness and his _Peeta-ness_. He comes to her willingly, warm and steady and strong and everything she needs him to be, while he wraps her closer and pulls her into his lap and breathes oxygen and freedom and purity into her, everything he wants her to be.

"I love you," he breathes into her mouth, against her lips, painting her skin with the colors of his heart.

"Real," she whispers back, because this isn't a mirage to be painted into his sketchbook, it's here and true and she doesn't want him to doubt it.

"Katniss," he says, her name like a song in his throat (and maybe he really is her mockingjay, and all this time, she was really trying to coax _him_ closer to her hunter's simple kindnesses), and the fire in Katniss burns high and hot. Behind them, the sketchbook puffs into ashes, but she doesn't care, there will be other sketchbooks and better memories to put inside them, better stories to tell, better dreams to live for.

She draws back just enough to etch her own truths into his skin, each sealed with a kiss and watered with tears. "In every world," she whispers her secret to him, "I would find you. In any world, it would be you. It's always going to be you."

He's kind and sweet and shy, but her words are like a wildfire inside him, and he is bold and adept and clever, devouring her and stoking the hunger that lives in them both. But Katniss isn't worried. Peeta's always been able to satisfy her hunger, has always fed her and filled her up (with burned bread and with kindness and with hope and with love), and this is no different.

Together, they burn.

Together, they write new truths.

* * *

No lie, Peeta knows, is ever more powerful than when planted amidst truth. No truth is ever so brilliant as when contrasted against a lie.

There was a girl.

There was a boy.

A truth and a lie, because there was a girl and there was a boy, but they were never alone. They were never unloved. They were, ever and always, tied together in ways the world couldn't understand.

Here, with her voice vibrating through his skin and his warmth filling her up from the inside out, the truth and the lies finally come together, more powerful and potent than ever.

This is the truth: he loves her and she loves him.

This is the lie...

There is no lie, because for once, it is completely and totally _real_.

The End

* * *

A/N: We made it to the end! If you kept reading and persevered even through all the confusing parts, thank you! I hope you enjoyed (and of course, be sure to let me know what you thought with a comment!) and that it didn't ruin Hunger Games for you! Also, as I'm sure was rather obvious (though hopefully not too off-putting), I know next to nothing about baking, so like Katniss, I pretend that part of Peeta is pretty magical and didn't go into many details. Also, how many squirrels DO equal a loaf of bread? I guessed and pretended it was okay. Aside from those random bits, this story was so much fun to write and I'm so glad that it finally is down and out and I can read it myself!

Thank you for all the reviews and favorites and follows! Seriously, I can't tell you what it means to me!

Oh, and if I forgot to mention it before, no copyright infringement is intended - just some kind of outlet for all the love I hold for this series!


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